...between activity and several disorders. Studies have been done to understand serotonin and physiology in humans, and medications that can increase serotonin activity to offset negative affects (Hariri and Brown, 2006, p. 12). This report will summarize the details of how serotonin, and how the Limbic System affects human behaviors. EMOTION: SEROTONIN, AND LIMBIC SYSTEM 3 Emotions: The roles of serotonin, and limbic system Emotions are generally defined as a state of mind that may reflect joy or fear, although, emotions also consist of patterns of physiological responses that lead to specific behaviors, which is what this paper will reflect. Specifically, the physiological responses of behavior are a direct reflection of how serotonin and the various areas of the Limbic System affect an individual. Imbalances of one or all three of these may constitute negative emotions such as fear, antisocial disorder, anger, poor impulse control, aggression, and depression. Research will show that emotions are not just a state of mind, but that behaviors are...
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...conditional fear), and fewer studies on the fear memory extinction as a treatment for psychiatric conditions based on learned fears Such as phobias, PTSD, and general anxiety. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Pavlovian conditional fear is widely used as a model for stress induction and anxiety disorders. The induction of conditional...
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...Running Head: Facial Expression of Emotions FACIAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS Pysc 380 – Physiological Psychology Abstract Emotions are shown in many different ways. One way in which are emotions are show in is our facial expressions. Facial expressions are responses that are innate, unlearned, automatic behavior. What causes these innate responses and what do they mean? There have been many articles and studies done on trying to understand all possible aspects of human and animal facial expressions. The emotional aspects of these facial expressions are vastly different. The goal of this paper is to better understand, both psychologically and physiologically, the nature of communication of emotions through facial expressions. Facial Expression of Emotions The warmth of a smile or a face contorted in anger, facial expressions tell the world our emotional state. Facial expressions relay information faster than words can be spoken. Ralph Adolphs wrote an article entitled “Perception and Emotion, How we recognize Facial Expressions.” In this article the author states on how some emotional responses through facial expressions are so fast that it is not possible for someone to be aware of the stimulus (Adolphs, 2006.) There have been many studies of how facial expressions can create activity almost immediately in a person’s brain. These studies are of importance because it helps the theory that cognitive judgment...
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...perceiving a situation in such a way as to create fear, which in turn begins the fight or flight response. When you have fear, your brain immediately goes to work sending the information on two different paths simultaneously. One path is extremely fast and is designed to react first, ask questions later; ‘better safe than sorry’ is the amygdala’s motto. The other path takes its time analyzing the information and comparing it to things in memory and paying attention to other possible clues. When your senses detect a sound, motion, or smell, they send this information to the thalamus. The thalamus doesn’t know if...
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...Anxiety WHAT TRIGGERS IT... When the senses pick up a threat--a loud noise, a scary sight, a creepy feeling--the information takes two different routes through the brain A THE SHORTCUT When startled, the brain automatically engages an emergency hot line to its fear center, the amygdala. Once activated, the amygdala sends the equivalent of an all-points bulletin that alerts other brain structures. The result is the classic fear response: sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, increased blood pressure and a burst of adrenaline. All this happens before the mind is conscious of having smelled or touched anything. Before you know why you're afraid, you are B THE HIGH ROAD Only after the fear response is activated does the conscious mind kick into gear. Some sensory information, rather than traveling directly to the amygdala, takes a more circuitous route, stopping first at the thalamus--the processing hub for sensory cues--and then the cortex--the outer layer of brain cells. The cortex analyzes the raw data streaming in through the senses and decides whether they require a fear response. If they do, the cortex signals the amygdala, and the body stays on alert ...AND HOW THE BODY RESPONDS By putting the brain on alert, the amygdala triggers a series of changes in brain chemicals and hormones that puts the entire body in anxiety mode STRESS-HORMONE BOOST Responding to signals from the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, the adrenal glands pump out high levels of the stress hormone cortisol...
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...In worse cases, the brain may determine everything to be a threat to the child. This makes the child unable to assimilate society and the ways of other people. For the people with vulnerability to PTSD either through genetics or because of their childhood, the illness essentially cripples them from truly experience reality and society. Despite the fact that PTSD is thought to develop when people are forced into similar situations, the actual illness doesn't work that way. Not everyone develops PTSD after being in some event that induces fear. Also, not everyone experiences fear and anxiety before developing the mental illness. Those two aspects are only some of the symptoms of PTSD that manifest from traumatic event exposure. There are many more symptoms like experiencing sadness, guilt, depression, and anger. Not every person has the same symptoms. Even though there are many different symptoms for PTSD, there are a few aspects of PTSD that are very common among victims. One of these aspects involves...
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...The source of energy that keeps everything going is called ATP. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the biochemical way to store and use energy. Exercise: body creates more ATP, needs more oxygen increases breathing, heart start pumping more blood to your mussels What happen when you become fearful? Fear you expectation something threatening is going to happen After hearing or seeing something that scares you that data is relayed to the THALAMUS the thalamus then sends that message to your AMYGDALA through the long way. The amygdala is important for fear because it release key neural transmitter through your body. Neural transmitter are chemicals in the body that the nerve cells in the brain called neurons us to communicate with each other in the nervous system. The most important neural transmitter in the fear response in called...
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...The VNS is known for enhancing memory and can be used to direct cortical plasticity, such as treating tinnitus or motor deficits, in rats and humans. Therefore, in their study, the professors tested to see whether VNS would also help guide plasticity involved with memory extinction by strengthening the pathway between IL and BLA in rats. The results had met the expectations. Vagus nerve stimulation had made the pathway between IL and BLA more powerful and stronger, which allowed the extinction of conditioned fear responses. The rats given VNS were seen to have enhanced memory extinction. The mechanisms underlying VNS activity are still being debated on, but the release of various neurotransmitters, including serotonin and norepinephrine, by VNS does seem to improve memory extinction (Pena, et al.,...
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...Portugal School of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal b c Abstract This study examined the relation between psychopathic traits and the brain response to facial emotion by analyzing the N170 component of the ERP. Fifty-four healthy participants were assessed for psychopathic traits and exposed to images of emotional and neutral faces with varying spatial frequency content. The N170 was modulated by the emotional expressions, irrespective of psychopathic traits. Fearless dominance was associated with a reduced N170, driven by the low spatial frequency components of the stimuli, and dependent on the tectopulvinar visual pathway. Conversely, coldheartedness was related to overall enhanced N170, suggesting mediation by geniculostriate processing. Results suggest that different dimensions of psychopathy are related to distinct facial emotion processing mechanisms and support the existence of both amygdala deficits and compensatory engagement of cortical structures for emotional processing in psychopathy. Descriptors: Psychopathic traits, N170, Facial emotion Although psychopathy has frequently been related to impairments in processing facial fear, with these deficits being regarded as building blocks...
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...Introduction The human body has been designed a mechanism to deal with pain and damage. The human immune system deals with all kinds of injures. The human immune system helps regulate bodily functions. When the body is exposed to a certain amount of pain the body goes into shock. This can be a life threatening situation or it can be the bodies’ response to the life threatening situation allowing a solders to keep fighting and things of that nature. If the damage the body may go into what is called a "comatose" condition. Where all nonessential function shuts down for repairs. This is due to the trauma that was experienced. Many of these actions are automated. This is because God has a system in the body to regulate the body. With that in mind PTSD is put into two different categories. They would be direct exposure and indirect exposure to an event. Direct events would be first hand experiences but the person. A point in time that the person felt significant risk of life and limb. An indirect traumatic event would be if an individual would witness a traumatic event. The mind has the same kind of defense mechanism. This is used to cope with severe mental trauma or mental stress. When a person goes through extremely powerful mental trauma that the mind cannot deal with the pain many things happen. One of those things is PTSD or post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This report will look at this disorder from a biblical point of view using the lives of many people. Dreams The...
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...sentences). There is one thing in life that I deeply dislike and fear and that is a spider. The sight of this eight legged creepy, web spinning, hairy, ugly creature sends me running for cover. Describe the subfield (e.g., cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, psychoanalytic psychology, etc.) you believe is best suited for providing psychological insight into your preference (the fact that you like or dislike the thing you do) and why you believe it is so. I believe that both cognitive and behavioral psychology provides me with the best psychological insight into my arachnophobia. Cognitive psychology explains my irrational fear of spiders because their perspectives of are based off of cognition which is memory, thinking, reasoning and decision making. This area of study suits my preference because my initial fear of spiders was based off of the memory of my grandmother, and her severe reaction to these small creatures. Behavioral psychology also offers insight into my fear because it focuses on observable behaviors, such as classical and operant conditioning, which are learned behaviors. Classical Conditioning is an originally neutral stimulus, which elicits a reaction and after repetition becomes a conditioned response, and Operant Conditioning is learned behaviors from positive/negative reinforcement and punishment. Behavioral psychology explains my fear because I was classically conditioned to fear spiders as a result of a bite by a brown recluse that forced...
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...bodily mechanisms….’ McLean (1963, cited in Plutchik 1994, p3) suggests ‘Emotional feelings guide our behaviour with respect to the two basic life principles of self-preservation and the preservation of the species.’ Arguably, these definitions allude to evolutionary nature and innateness of emotion, but the former refers also to physiological changes. Plutchik (1994) highlights some confusion over what qualifies as an emotion, and suggests that emotions are goal orientated: - emotion fear – goal escape. Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger and Weiss (1989, cited in Slater & Muir, 1999) distinguish between the primary emotions of joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust and surprise, found in babies, and the secondary emotions of embarrassment, empathy and envy which emerge alongside self-awareness and as a result of increased cognitive capacity. Arguably, this implies that there are developmental and cognitive aspects to emotion. Despite general consensus among psychologists that emotion is a response to stimuli received by the sensory receptors via the thalamus, it is debated whether emotion is triggered by the bodies’...
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...Although the cortex that surrounds the amygdala is crucial for declarative memories. Moreover, the amygdala has been identified as the emotional control center (Squire, L. & Kandel, E., 2009, pg.107). Furthermore, the amygdala has been identified to participate in the human learning of fear. A study done at the University of Iowa presented participants with a neutral tone followed by a loud, obnoxious noise. After many successive neutral noises, followed by a loud bang, normal individuals experienced an emotional arousal, normally in the form of perspiration. Individuals with amygdala damage did not experience an emotional response to the loud noise. After training, most patients understood that a loud noise followed the neutral tone, while patients with amygdala damage still did not experience or react with fear and/or anxiety as normal patients did. Further studies of rats with amygdala lesions imply the indirect pathway of fear learning. This indirect pathway moves from the thalamus to the perirhinal cortex to the lateral nucleus, while the normal pathway moves through the subcortical areas (Squire, L. & Kandel, E., 2009, pg.185). Additionally, Wixted et. al found that there was no activation of the amygdala during the sparse and distributed coding of episodic memory. This study adds to the conclusion that the hippocampal damage has an effect on memory recognition, while damage to the amygdala does not. (Witxed et. al,...
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...caused by hormonal imbalance. Anxiety is frequently defined as one of the most frightening fears. It’s associated with the possibility of something dangerous is about to happen. Most people have experienced anxiety and fear, just the mere of falling on the ground, the site of blood gushing out, being attacked by a dog/wild animal or even an automobile accident. Many will freeze due to Amygdala, which is associated with feelings of fear and aggression, while sending signals to the frontal cortex, then reacting to the flight or fight response. Hormonal imbalance is such a broad topic and is not clearly defined. However, anxiety can be a result of hormonal imbalance. When the body releases too much hormones from the thyroid, it causes stress which produces too much cortisone. When this happens, anxiety may occur. A person may experience crying, trouble concentrating, worry, mind going blank, bad dreams, nightmares, or apprehension. Anxiety disorders have an emotional component that includes underlying concerns and experiences that have been avoided or not addressed. Such experiences have produced great levels of agony and sadness. Anxiety disorders are usually the result of the underlying conditions (Hansell & Damour, 2008). Physiological reactions are one of the key components in experiencing anxiety. Anxiety has a lot to do with the physiological reaction when experiencing fear and anxiety. Many who experience this feel worried all the time. Due to the worrying, the...
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...Synaptic plasticity is mediated in part by postsynaptic changes that include the amount of receptors that bind neurotransmitter, types of receptors themselves, and the function of the receptors in position (Kessels and Malinow, 2009). Experience-dependent behavioral formation is expressed as the result of the change in receptor structure and function, thereby allowing synaptic strength to be altered in the brain regions controlling certain behavior types. The generation of appropriate behaviors in response to environmental signals requires communication between various brain regions. Communication between the prefrontal cortex (PFC), striatum, hippocampus, and the amygdala is important in appropriate choice of action (Figure 1). The PFC...
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