NEURO

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Cards (149)

  • Emotion
    Defined in terms of three components: Cognition, Readiness for action, Feeling
  • James-Lange theory of emotion
    Suggests that the autonomic arousal and skeletal action occurs first in an emotion. The emotion that is felt is the label that we give the arousal of the organs and muscle.
  • James-Lange theory leads to two predictions
    1. People with a weak autonomic or skeletal response should feel less emotion. 2. Increasing one's response should enhance an emotion
  • People with damage to the spinal cord generally report experiencing emotions about the same as before their injury
  • People with pure autonomic failure say they feel their emotions much less intensely than before
  • People with BOTOX injections that temporarily paralyzed all the facial muscles reported weaker than usual emotional responses
  • Physiological responses are seldom sufficient to produce emotional feelings, but they increase the feelings
  • Walter Cannon objected that feedback from the viscera is neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion, that it does not distinguish one emotion from another, and that it is too slow to account for how fast we identify an event as happy, sad, or frightening
  • Limbic system
    Forebrain areas surrounding the thalamus - traditionally been regarded as critical for emotion
  • PET and fMRI studies suggest many other areas of the cerebral cortex, especially the frontal and temporal lobes, are activated during an emotional experience
  • Serotonin
    The role of serotonin is very complicated and should not be thought of as the "antiaggression" transmitter
  • During aggression, the brain releases serotonin
  • Clinical depression is linked to low serotonin
  • High levels of serotonin may inhibit a variety of impulses
  • Amygdala
    Important in the experience of emotions for it provides a link between the perception of an emotion producing stimulus and the recall of that stimulus later leading to a conditioned response later on
  • Damage to the amygdala interferes with the learning of fear responses, retention of fear responses previously learned, and interpreting or understanding stimuli with emotional consequences
  • Damage to the amygdala does not result in the loss of emotion in humans
  • Damage to the amygdala impairs the processing of emotional information when the signals are subtle or complicated
  • Amygdala damage affects the ability to judge "trustworthiness" in people
  • Amygdala damage affects the ability to recognize emotions specifically in photographs or pictures, particularly for fear or disgust
  • Amygdala damage does not affect the ability to recognize fear in real life
  • Genetic variations in amygdala arousal may underlie some of the variations of anxiety in the population and related disorders
  • Excessive fear and anxiety disorders are associated with hyperactivity in the amygdala
  • Steroid hormones
    Derived from cholesterol, contain four carbon rings and exert their effects in three ways: binding to membrane receptors, entering cells and activating certain proteins, and binding to chromosomes to activate or inactivate certain genes
  • Sex hormones
    A special kind of steroids, released mostly by the gonads and to a lesser degree by the adrenal glands, affecting the brain, genital and other organs
  • Types of sex hormones
    • Androgens
    • Estrogens
  • Testosterone
    The most widely known androgen
  • Estradiol
    The most prominent type of estrogen
  • Progesterone
    Another predominantly female hormone, prepares the uterus for the implantation of a fertilized ovum and promotes the maintenance of pregnancy
  • Biologists assumed that hormones account for all the biological differences between males and females, but later research demonstrated that the X and Y chromosomes control some differences independently of hormones
  • The Y chromosome has many sites that alter the expression of genes on other chromosomes
  • Genes on the X and Y chromosomes produce effects beyond those that can be traced to androgens and estrogens
  • For most brain areas, the male-female differences are less well understood than they are for the hypothalamus
  • The mechanisms for sex differences in the brain include not only testosterone and estradiol, but also close to a hundred genes that are more active in one sex or the other
  • Very few people have a brain that is male-typical or female-typical in all regards. Almost anyone's brain is a mosaic of male-typical, female-typical, and approximately neutral areas
  • In most cases, the relationship between brain differences and behavioral differences is mere speculation
  • Most people have a mixture of male-typical, female-typical, and neutral interests, attitudes, and activities
  • Testosterone
    Essential for male sexual arousal, acts partly by increasing touch sensitivity in the penis
  • Testosterone primes the medial preoptic area and several other brain areas to release dopamine, and the more dopamine they release, the more likely the male is to copulate
  • Levels of testosterone correlate positively with men's sexual arousal and their drive to seek sexual partners