Extreme Human Emotions are the Sole Product of Biological Functioning

The definition of fear has proved to be an elusive mystery plaguing scientists. While there is much agreement as to the physiological effects of fear, the neural pathways and connections that bring upon these effects are not well understood. From the evolutionary standpoint, the theory is that fear is a neural circuit that has been designed to keep the organism alive in dangerous situations (1). How does it all work? Learning and responding to stimuli that warn of danger involves neural pathways that send information about the outside world to the amygdala, which in turn, determines the significance of the stimulus and triggers emotional responses like freezing or fleeing as well as changes

you muscles also tighten up to allow you to run or fight with all your energy without getting a cramp or pulling a muscle. Being afraid is a natural way that our bodies prepare ourselves to make quick decisions and react upon these decisions without taking an excessive amount of time. There are other changes that also occurs when someone is experiencing fear, especially large amounts. The brain is very complex and has more than one hundred billion nerve cells which are all an intricate network in themselves. These cells create communications which is everything we sense, think, or do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action, but others produce autonomic responses. when you are experiencing fear, your reactions are almost completely automatic so you don’t even know it is happening until it has. There are many parts of the brain than can be linked to experiencing or reacting to fear but the main parts responsible are: The Thalamus, the Sensory Cortex, the Hippocampus, the Amygdala and the Hypothalamus. The Thalamus decides where new sensory data should be sent (eyes, ears, mouth or skin.) The Sensory Cortex Interprets sensory data and the Hippocampus stores and retrieves memories regarding the topic or situation to form a context. The Amygdala is much like the Hippocampus in the way that it stores traumatic memories, but it also recognises threats and determines emotions. The Hypothalamus is the last and final responder. The

The neural regulation of emotional perception, learning, and memory is essential for normal behavioral and cognitive functioning. The neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) modulates neural regions involved in emotional learning, perception, and memory formation. The amygdala is part of the interconnected set of structures that are referred to as the limbic system. The primary function of the limbic system is to modulate emotional and motivated behavior. The amygdala plays a key role in evaluating the emotional valence of stimuli. An example of this is when the amygdala lesions defect fear behavior in animals. In humans the amygdala is sensitive to facial expressions of fear or threatening words. This could be represented by wide-eye expressions. Damage to the amygdala impairs the ability to recognize the emotion of fear. Urbach-Wiethe disease is a genetic disorder leading to atrophy of the amygdala. Patients with amygdala damage are less responsive to features in negative faces.

One of the main exceptions to the bleak state of affairs regarding the brain mechanisms of emotion is the body of research concerned with neural system underlying fear, especially in the context of the behavioral paradigm called fear conditioning. It has, in fact, been research on fear conditioning, and the progress that has been made on this topic, that has been largely responsible for the renaissance of interest of emotion within neuroscience. In this work, the fear system has been treated as a set of processing circuits that detect and respond to danger, rather than as a mechanism through which subjective states of fear are experienced. Through this approach, fear is operationalized, or made experimentally tractable. Some limbic areas turn

Did you know that 75% of people suffer from glossophobia. There are usually 5 kids in every grade who suffer from it. Glossophobia is very common, especially in a school or at a job. It is more common in adults than children. You may experience glossophobia before a performance or speech. When we first sense fear our sensory organs gather information and send it to the thalamus to get processed. The information then gets sent to the amygdala. The amygdala activates our brain stem. It triggers our bodies freeze response. The amygdala also signals nerves that control facial muscles. The amygdala also signals the hypothalamus. Starting our fight or flight response. Our heart rate increases, blood pressure, and sweat.

Fear is an emotion experienced in most all living creatures; this emotion is experienced precisely because it is a survival mechanism developed to protect an individual during dangerous or uncomfortable situations, combining physical and psychological aspects together in the uniformity of monism. Comparing studies between one concerning a lessened neurological processing of pain in fearful subjects that are administered light shocks and a separate study concerning the recognition of fearful bodily expressions, the true invariability of psychology and physiology will be addressed. Fear can be thought of as a series of reactions that occur, beginning with a stressful stimulus that activates the sympathetic nervous system, also known as the “fight

The Cannon-Bard Theory states that I experienced my arousal and fear at the same time. The arousal does not cause emotion and emotions do not cause arousal. It co-occurs. For example, while my heart was racing, I was feeling scared at the same time. There is evidence that our arousal does influence our experience of emotion. With an experiment with people with lower and higher spinal cord injuries and how they felt. This theory also does not include how cognition affects our experience of emotion. (Myers, DeWall)

Emotion and Physiology go hand in hand when it comes to experiencing fear. It is also known as the “fight or flight” response. Whenever someone is in a crisis situation, stress hormones are released into the blood stream, your heart begins to pump faster and harder, your pupils dilate, and your blood level rises. Anxiety can also have an effect in triggering the same physiological events. All these physical features prepare you with the given choice of either confronting or fleeing the threat. However, fear is not the only emotion that this response involves physical changes. “Tears pour from the eyes during intense sadness and joy. Anger is associated with sweating, elevated heart rate, and heightened blood flow to the hands in anticipation

An amygdala is at its very essence linked to the sentiment of anxiety or fear. Its function is more broadly defined to the genre of emotions only because anxiety or fear can manifest themselves in far more colors than their prototypes are limited to; fear can make an individual lash out, a behavioral mechanism that is typically comprehended as anger, and anxiety can cause a person to break down or cry, and society would perceive this as depression. Most emotions are interconnected, and no matter the emotion one feels they are experiencing with respect to a particular hurdle in their life, those emotions are an incarnation of either fear or anxiety, which in turn are born to the human brain’s amygdala. An individual can call something their

What causes fear is a warning trigger as a cause of the 2-system-view that produces an instinctive biological reaction to an environmental trigger stimulus. Also, the cognitive system reaction of emotional stimuli may cause a response through interpretative and social, subjective on the basis of one’s experience through events. Therefore, fear may be an emotional reaction to causal life events or stimulus, coping and response strategies initiate and activate responses. For example, fear triggers fight or flight, raises cortisol levels in the brain, and initiates emotional and physical reactions. The emotion of fear may cause different effects, for example, with positive affect; there may be a cause to seek safety in a dangerous situation or

Thomas et al., 2007) There research looked at one aspect of emotional recognition in images specifically the face. They found that adolescent brains have not developed to the point where there neurons can active efficiently when identifying an emotion such as anger compared to that of happiness. Many of the areas in an adolescent brains have yet to develop, one of the areas that appears to be the most essential is the amygdala according to K. Thomas et al. (2001). In their research they tested the response of fear and anger in the amygdala from images of faces. The amygdala is shown to have increased activation in adults versus that of adolescents. According to Adolphs (2002) the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortices may trigger prior knowledge and project that onto a stimuli when creating an emotional response. Through their research they concluded “discrete facial expression continues to develop throughout childhood and early adolescence.” (K. Thomas et al.,

Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. It comes from the parts of the brain called the amygdala and the hippocampus, which are both located near the center of the brain. The amygdala are two almond shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the temporal lobes of the brain which perform a primary role in the processing of memory, decision making, and emotions, including fear. The hippocampus is a major building block of the brains of humans and connects to the amygdala. It has been found that people develop specific fears as a result of learning, or after an accident or experience. Because of this, there are many common fears that we all share,

Adrenal glands are another bodily organ that has a performance that can be edited by fear. The brain’s amygdala activates the autonomic

Research in “nonhuman primates suggest that stress and prolonged glucocorticoid exposure may damage the hippocampus which increases a person’s risk for developing anxiety or affective disorders” (Irle et al., 2010). This team of researchers did MRI scans of individual’s brains, and found evidence that patients with social phobia had smaller amygdala and hippocampus areas in their brains. Fear is a very common emotion to experience, and in many ways can be beneficial (Fears, foibles and,” 2010). Children should be fearful of speeding cars and strangers. Adults should fear putting themselves in situations where danger could occur. Both of these types of fears are healthy fears, but people who have abnormal fears it can become detrimental to their overall well-being. All people should have a certain level of fears, but too much fear is not good to have. A good acronym to describer fear is “false evidence appearing real”

Chapter 1 explains the work of a Harvard psychologist named William James. William published the article “What is an Emotion?” in a philosophical journal entitled Mind in 1884. His paper is an argument for the primacy and necessity of bodily systems in producing emotional feelings. James-Lange theory states that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. A Harvard physiologist, Walter Cannon, roundly criticized James’ theory, claiming that, according to the Cannon Bard theory, physiological changes follow emotional expression.