Coming on the heels of my blog post Clearing up confusion: The amygdala is not the same as the reptile brain & it's probably not reserved for fear is a news release from Association of Psychological Sciences with more information which I hope will continue the cleaning up of the amygdala's reputation in the media. And clear up its role in our day-to-day to lives.
The release:
The Amygdala And Fear Are Not The Same Thing
In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated – displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear – especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors of a new paper which will be published in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Indeed, many experiments have found that the amygdala is active when people are afraid. But it also activates at other times, for example in response to pleasant photographs and happy faces.
The misconception came from how scientists first approached studying the brain. A lot of people came to the amygdala from the study of fear, says Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who co wrote the new paper with Tobias Brosch of New York University. “It’s a great emotion to study because it’s very important, evolutionarily, and we know a lot about fear in animals,” Cunningham says. Almost every study of fear finds that the amygdala is active. But that doesn’t mean every spark of activity in the amygdala means the person is afraid.
Instead, the amygdala seems to be doing something more subtle: processing events that are related to what a person cares about at the moment. So if you’re in a scary situation or have an anxious personality, the amygdala might be activated by a frightening image. But hungry people have increased amygdala activity in response to pictures of food and people who are very empathetic have an amygdala response to seeing other people.
“When we’re studying emotion, people want to find specific brain parts that are associated with different
emotions,” Cunningham says. Especially in the early days of neuroscience, scientists hoped that soon it would be possible to use MRI and other brain-imaging techniques “to get under the hood and find out what people are really thinking.” A lot of the time, people really don’t know, or won’t say, what they’re thinking, and it would be nice to be able to look at a picture of their brain and know the answer. But the brain is too complicated for that. Cunningham also thinks many scientists have gotten too attached to a rigid definition of emotions—anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and so on.
However you may feel, it seems that many different parts of the brain are involved. ”Emotion is going to be distributed across the brain,” Cunningham says.
Note: The abstract from the paper "Motivational Salience: Amygdala Tuning From Traits, Needs, Values, and Goals" (Current Directions in Psychological Science):
Based on a basic emotions perspective, a dominant view in psychology is that the primary function of the amygdala is to govern the emotion of fear. In this view, the amygdala is necessary for a person to feel afraid, and when amygdala activity is detected, one can infer that a person is feeling afraid or threatened. In this paper, we review current research on amygdala function that calls into question this threat-specific view and propose a more general view of amygdala functioning based on appraisal theory and psychological constructivism. Specifically, we examine the hypothesis that the amygdala is involved in processing stimulus relevance for the goals and motivations of the perceiver. Thus, although threatening stimuli are almost always considered a relevant stimulus, novel, ambiguous, and extremely positive stimuli can also be relevant for different people in different situations. Once deemed relevant, the amygdala guides processing to orchestrate an appropriate response.
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