Amygdala

America is one of only a few countries in the world that sentences adolescents to life in prison under the age of 18. Around 200,000 minors are charged in adults courts every year and by 2006 nearly 7000 minors were being housed in adult jails. The people making the decisions for the children who cannot make decisions for themselves are the ones saying they should be sent to an adult prison and some may even have to spend their lives there. Not many people could say they deserve it and some…

The stance of the article, “Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia),’’ found on PsychologyToday.com, is similar, with some differences, to the academic journal, “Social anxiety disorder: Recent developments in psychological approaches to conceptualization and treatment’’ by Lisa Anne Lampe. Both articles focus on the definition and treatment of social anxiety disorder. Psychology Today’s article, “Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia),” relays information on social anxiety disorder, or social…

According to Pechmann, et al., due to experience and age, the adolescent’s brain is changing, especially in the “prefrontal cortex” and “amygdala” (2005, p. 206). The prefrontal cortex plays an important role in decision-making, uses previous experience to guide behaviors, and can slow down the stimuli to encourage activity; the amygdala converts feelings into emotions that can be influenced by teenagers’ increased levels of circulating hormones (Pechmann et al., 2005). The increased…

Do Adolescents Have the Right to Make Autonomous Medical Choices? The World Health Organization defines adolescence as “the period in human growth and development that occurs after childhood and before adulthood, from ages 10 to 19.” During this stage, it is expected for one to seek independence and authority when making decisions i.e., what clothes to wear, who to communicate with, etc. In most cases the decision to be made are easy calls, however, there maybe instances where the decision is…

When we conceptualize about learning, in a broad sense, the focus tends to be placed on understanding and retention in a normal calm setting. But what happens when stress, fear or pressure is added? How is the learning process affected? That very question sparked my curiosity in understanding how we biologically react and perform under stress. Michael Mendl (1999) outlines that when we are faced with threatening or challenging stimuli our cognitive functioning is directly affected. Discussion in…

Nitschke et al (2009) cited in Datta (2010), suggested that people with (G.A.D) may have an overactive amygdala, the activity within the amygdala of patients with G.A.D and a group without was studied. This study concluded that the patients with G.A.D became abnormally anxious, even when what was being shown to them was not unpleasant. Currently it is not known why some people have an overactive amygdala. Evidence suggests that chronic stressors within adult life and childhood alongside genetic…

Panic attacks are defined as abrupt surges of intense fear or discomfort that peak within minutes. Pretty much anyone can have a panic attack, in fact, most people have one once or twice before the die. People diagnosed with panic disorder are not as lucky. One out of 75 people are diagnosed with Panic Disorder, women twice as likely than men (Burke, 2016). These people have frequent and unexpected attacks that they live in fear of having more of. Panic disorder can be caused by many different…

hippocampus, and amygdala. The amygdala is involved with several parts of emotional processing. In particular, it is involved with, as this paper states, “mediating adaptive and pathological fear responses” (Mathew et al., 2008, pg. 3). The amygdala also functions in the acquisition of fear conditioning, meaning that it acts in the formation of a conditioned fear response to a stimulus. As such, people who have social anxiety disorder are seen to have more responsivity within their amygdala in…

amygdalae may not perform the same roles in emotional stimuli such as a normal cognitive individual would. It is revealed that the right amygdala performs a detection role that responds to the emotional stimuli, while the left amygdala is to help stimuli evaluation. Also, there was evidence that reductions lagged in the connectivity from both sides of the amygdala to the dmPFC during a negative situation. These suggestions of the failed connectivity can explain why these schizophrenia patients…

The memory works in a process of three stages- encoding, storage and retrieval. This enables humans to learn new material, store the material and then retrieve and extract it at a later date when necessary (Eysenck & Keane, 2010). However, many psychologists have researched the effect of emotion on these stages of memory processing. Many have been interested in the idea of emotion affecting the ability to accurately retrieve past events due to many alternating factors. Some argue that matching…