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Human brain in the coronal orientation. Amygdalae are shown in dark red. The amygdala (/ ə ˈ m ɪ ɡ d ə l ə /; pl.: amygdalae / ə ˈ m ɪ ɡ d ə l i,-l aɪ / or amygdalas; also corpus amygdaloideum; Latin from Greek, ἀμυγδαλή, amygdalē, 'almond', 'tonsil' [1]) is a paired nuclear complex present in the cerebral hemispheres of vertebrates.
Reinforcement association located in the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, where the incentive value of stimuli is decoded, is sufficient to elicit emotion-based learning and to affect behavior via, for example, the orbitofrontal-striatal pathway. [18] [19] This process can occur via implicit or explicit processes. [18]
An amygdala hijack is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. [1] The term, coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ , [ 2 ] is used by affective neuroscientists ...
The amygdala plays a key role in emotional processing especially fear, and amygdala function appears to be emotionally lateralized. When people are shown fearful faces the left amygdala and left periamygdaloid cortex increase in activation. There also appears to be a greater increase in neural activity in the left amygdala corresponding to an ...
Besides memory, the amygdala also seems to be an important brain region involved in attentional and emotional processes. First, to define attention in cognitive terms, attention is the ability to focus on some stimuli while ignoring others. Thus, the amygdala seems to be an important structure in this ability.
For example, anterograde amnesia, from damage of the medial temporal lobe, is an impairment of declarative memory that affects both episodic and semantic memory operations. [16] Originally, Tulving proposed that episodic and semantic memory were separate systems that competed with each other in retrieval.
The amygdala can hijack the pre-frontal cortex in a sympathetic response. In his book Emotional Intelligence Goleman uses the case of Jason Haffizulla (who assaulted his high school physics teacher because of a grade he received on a test) as an example of an emotional hijacking in which rationality and better judgement can be impaired. [31]
The term flashbulb memory was coined by Brown and Kulik in 1977. [2] They formed the special-mechanism hypothesis, which argues for the existence of a special biological memory mechanism that, when triggered by an event exceeding critical levels of surprise and consequentiality, creates a permanent record of the details and circumstances surrounding the experience. [2]