by David Hambling ROBOTS developed in the safety of a laboratory can be too slow to react to the dangers of the real world. But software inspired by biology promises to give robots the equivalent of the mammalian amygdala, a part of the brain that responds quickly to threats. STARTLE, developed by Mike Hook and colleagues at Roke Manor Research of Romsey in Hampshire, UK, employs an artificial neural network to look out for abnormal or inconsistent data. Once it has been taught what is out of the ordinary, it can recognise dangers in the environment. For instance, from data fed by a robotic vehicle's on-board sensors, STARTLE could notice a pothole and pass a warning to the vehicle's control system to focus more computing resources on that part of the road. "If it sees something anomalous then investigative processing is cued; this allows us to use computationally expensive algorithms only when needed for assessing possible threats, rather than responding equally to everything," says Hook. This design mimics the amygdala, which provides a rapid response to threats. The amygdala helps small animals to deal with complex, fast-changing surroundings, allowing them to ignore most sensory stimuli. "The key is that it's for spotting anomalous conditions," says Hook, "not routine ones." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17214 - Posted: 08.29.2012

By NATALIE ANGIER Deseada Parejo, a biologist at the Arid Zones Experimental Research Station in Almería, Spain, was studying family dynamics behavior in Eurasian rollers — spectacular jay-size birds with long, slender tails and the Cray-Pas colors of parakeets. On removing one of the nestlings for a standard check of size and weight, she practically jumped at its horror-film response: The tiny chick gaped its mouth wide and vomited up a big dose of sticky orange liquid, enough to fill half a teaspoon. Dr. Parejo touched a second chick, a third, a sixth, and got the same expulsory retort. “I have worked with many other bird species,” she said, “but I never found anything similar to this vomiting behavior before.” Not only that: The fluid had a distinctive, evolving odor. “It’s like orange juice at first,” she said. “Then it begins to smell like insects, like the prey the parents provide.” In the current issue of Biology Letters, Dr. Parejo and her colleagues describe their study of this noteworthy aroma, which they designate the roller nestlings’ “smell of fear.” The researchers said that while the reflux reflex might well serve as a defense mechanism — helping to repel nest predators like snakes and rodents — they were interested in a different question: whether the parents could detect the olfactory cry of alarm, and if so, how they reacted. The answer to the first question was yes. But the parental response to the eau of offspring terror was anything but heroic; instead, it was a bit like those childhood nightmares, where the louder you cry out to Mom and Dad in a crowd, the faster they leave you behind. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17159 - Posted: 08.14.2012

By Eric Kandel Our attraction to faces, and particularly to eyes, appears to be innately determined. Infants as well as adults prefer to look at eyes rather than other features of a person’s face, and both infants and adults are sensitive to gaze. The direction of a person’s gaze is very important in our processing of the emotions displayed by that person’s face, because the brain combines information from gaze with information from facial expressions. Reginald Adams from Pennsylvania State University and Robert Kleck from Dartmouth College have found that a direct gaze and an expression of happy emotion facilitate the communication and processing of joy, friendliness, and approach-oriented emotions presumably because, as Uta Frith has found, only direct gaze recruits the dopaminergic reward system. In contrast, an averted, sad, or fearful gaze communicates the avoidance-oriented emotions of fear and sadness. Although gaze and facial expression are processed together, other aspects of beauty, such as gender and age, are processed independently. In a biological experiment designed to examine the neural correlates of beauty—that is, the mechanisms in our brain that account for our sense of beauty—John O’Doherty and his colleagues explored the role of the smile. They found that the orbitofrontal (ventrolateral) region of the prefrontal cortex, the region that is activated by reward and thought to be the apex of the representation of pleasure in the brain, is also activated by attractive faces. Moreover, the response of this region is enhanced by the presence of a smile. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 17151 - Posted: 08.13.2012

by Chelsea Wald Some of our personality traits from childhood stick with us for the rest of our lives. An early shyness on the playground doesn't always go away in the boardroom, for example. But what if your entire body changed as you aged, transforming you into a completely unrecognizable creature? Would you retain the personality of your youth? A new study in frogs suggests that you would. In the past decade, scientists have shown that a broad range of animals—from dogs to sea anemones—display consistent personalities throughout their lives. Despite changes in their environment, individuals maintain their tendencies, such as being more or less active and exploratory, relative to other individuals of their species. But some researchers have theorized that animals that undergo metamorphosis should be exceptions. The full-body transformation, seen in everything from frogs to butterflies, dramatically alters every aspect of the animal—not only its shape, but also where it lives and what it needs to do to survive and reproduce. Why, then, shouldn't metamorphosis also change the animal's personality, so that strengths in larvae don't become flaws in adults? The relative restlessness that helps a caterpillar find food better than its peers, for instance, could get the butterfly into trouble with predators. Few researchers have attempted to study personality before and after metamorphosis, says behavioral ecologist Alexander Wilson of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin. He says his new study of frogs, to be published later this month in Behavioral Ecology, is the first to tackle the question in vertebrates. It was hard, Wilson says, to find personality tests that would work well for tadpoles and frogs, which are like two distinct animals. "[They] reach a certain stage of their life and then, bam! They change into something completely different." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 17145 - Posted: 08.11.2012

By Travis Riddle In the final hand of the 2011 World Series of Poker, Pius Heinz, a 22-year-old German who had honed his poker chops online was matched up against 35-year-old Martin Staszko – a former Hyundai automobile plant foreman. Staszko was in bad shape, having only about a quarter of the chips his younger opponent had, and had been dealt a relatively mediocre hand. Despite this, he decided to risk it all in an attempt to wage a comeback. In effect, he was lying, and Heinz, fortunately blessed with a relatively good hand, called him on his lie. Heinz, having successfully detected his opponents attempt at deceit, won the hand, the tournament, and $8.7 million while Staszko, the failed deceiver, took runner up and had to console himself with just $5.4 million. Although humans are the only species that plays poker, we are far from the only species that uses deception. And though several million dollars may seem like a high stakes game to us, the stakes for animals which use deception are even higher – often life or death. A frog which successfully fakes its croak to make itself seem bigger will be more likely to succeed in life than a similarly sized one which unsuccessfully fakes its croak. However, the ability to detect deception is just as important as the ability to deceive. A female frog with a talent for detecting deception will be more likely to mate with the actual biggest frog in the pond, rather than the one which only sounds the biggest, ensuring a greater likelihood of success for her genes. And so the evolutionary arms race continues, with liars and lie detectors successively attempting to one-up each other in reproductive fitness. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 17086 - Posted: 07.25.2012

By Scicurious Ah, coffee, the beautiful stimulant without which about 90% of science and medicine would instantly retreat to the dark ages. Seriously, who hasn’t needed that extra cup of joe (or two, or three) to make it through another 14 hour experimental day, a 10 hour surgery, or, you know, both? But our favorite adenosine antagonist has a downside. Too much caffeine and you can get a racing heartbeat, nerves, and a certain amount of palm sweat, not to mention problems when you try to sleep at night. But all of that is just yourself. Does caffeine affect the way you view other people? Well, if you’re getting a little anxious, yes, it does. Caffeine does act the way other stimulants do. Instead of acting on neurotransmitters like dopamine or norepinephrine, caffeine acts on adenosine. Adenosine is another neurotransmitter, this one associated with things like sleepiness. High levels of adenosine promote sleepiness, and low levels promote wakefulness. Caffeine acts on the adenosine receptor as an antagonist, meaning that it blocks the effects of adenosine, promoting wakefulness. But wakefulness and sleepiness are not all that adenosine does. Adenosine and adenosine receptors have been implicated in things like anxiety disorders. This could be particularly important when these receptors are expressed in the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and periaqueductal grey, areas of the brain associated with things like fear processing and anxiety. And of course, if adenosine receptors are there, and caffeine is there, too, you might be getting some effects of caffeine on processing in these areas. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemical Bases of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 17078 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By Janice Lynch Schuster, It was early May, a hot and humid Friday night for the under-11 boys soccer game. My 10-year-old son collapsed on the field, unable to breathe. The coach grabbed another child’s inhaler and administered it to Ian, who, after six puffs (instead of the usual two) was able to catch his breath and stand. I wasn’t at the game, so I heard about the incident from my husband, who is unruffled at even the most dramatic moments. “Oh, yeah,” he said that night as we were headed to bed. “Ian had an asthma attack during the game, but he was fine.” It was only later that I heard the full, scary story from the coach. A few years earlier, on the heels of an upper-respiratory infection, Ian had been given a diagnosis of asthma. For a few months, he occasionally used an inhaler, but then the attacks stopped and we eventually stopped carrying it with us. Now, we were afraid, we were back to the asthma diagnosis. On Saturday morning, we took him to the nurse practitioner at the pediatrician’s office. She diagnosed a sports-induced bronchiospasm and sent Ian on his way with an inhaler (two puffs before every practice and game) along with antihistamines to counter any allergies he might be experiencing. She didn’t think it was anything serious — it seemed like a situation that millions of children and adults live with each day. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 17077 - Posted: 07.24.2012

By Maria Konnikova Daniel Smith has discovered the perfect cure for battling overwhelming sweat—the kind of sweat that soaks through the shirt, leaves nasty residue, and makes you want to avoid the company of fellow human beings for the foreseeable future. The kind, in other words, that is caused by a bout of anxiety (which can be provoked, naturally, by basically anything – typing at your computer, choosing a salad dressing, sitting on a bench in Boston Common). The magical solution? Place pads on the underside of your shirt, under your armpits. As in, feminine menstrual pads. When Daniel’s wife comes home one day with a jumbo pack of Always Ultra Thins™, he has “one of those Archimedes-in-the-bathtub moments.” His very own epiphany. “From then on,” he writes, “whenever I have had to leave the house to meet someone it behooves me not to repulse, I have worn beneath my arms a product expertly designed by a multinational corporation to absorb eighty milliliters of menstrual blood at a wearing.” And in that single image, the grown man with pads proudly under his arms, we see the scope of Smith’s new book, Monkey Mind: a balance of the devastating and the devastatingly hilarious. As Smith traces his ongoing battle with clinical anxiety, we learn just how disruptive and downright crippling the struggle can be—and how difficult it can be to acknowledge and diagnose, let alone begin to understand and treat. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 17076 - Posted: 07.24.2012

by Joseph Bennington-Castro Whether we realize it or not, most of us have a knee-jerk reaction when we see someone with a facial disfigurement, such as psoriasis, a cleft lip, or a birthmark. We may sit away from them on the bus, hesitate to shake their hand, or even give a barely masked look of revulsion. A new study suggests these disgust reactions stem from an ancient disease-avoidance system that normally prevents us from catching illnesses. Essentially, we treat facial disfigurements like infectious diseases. Psychologists have recently begun to uncover where disgust comes from, with some researchers believing the emotion is similar to fear. "Fear evolved to keep you away from large animals that want to eat you from the outside," says Valerie Curtis, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study. "Disgust evolved to keep you away from smaller animals that kill you from the inside." Our subconscious minds constantly scan the environment for signs of potential diseases, she says. If we see one, disgust kicks in and we avoid that object or person like the plague. But it seems our disease-avoidance system sometimes gets it wrong. Previous studies suggested these mistakes underlie the aversion people have to various disfigurements. For this to be true, our responses to people with facial disfigurements, which aren't contagious, would have to be the same as our responses to people with infectious diseases. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17075 - Posted: 07.21.2012

By Jason G. Goldman The idea behind quantifying personality is deceptively simple: personality refers to predictable differences in behavior between people. Those differences should be reasonably reliable. That is, they ought to hold constant across different types of situations. Those differences should also be reasonably stable, which means they should be consistent over time. For example, you might score high on the openness factor if you answer “yes” to questions like “I spend time reflecting on things,” and you might score low on the extraversion scale if you answer “no” to questions like “I talk to a lot of different people at parties.” According to personality theory, your answers to those questions shouldn’t change all that much as you grow older, nor should they be different if you complete the survey at home or at the office or at a shopping mall. Based on this definition of personality, it should be obvious that personality is not limited to humans. Indeed, animal behavior researchers are also interested in defining and quantifying personality. If measuring and describing personality is complicated for humans, it becomes vastly more so for animals. How are these individual differences in predictable responses measured, and classified? How are they even identified? What measurements should be used, and what traits do they measure? In a new paper in press in the journal Behavioural Processes, Noelle M. Watanabe and colleagues from the UCLA Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Psychology explore these questions using an unlikely animal model: the Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus). © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17041 - Posted: 07.14.2012

Ed Yong Uri Simonsohn, the researcher who flagged up questionable data in studies by social psychologist Dirk Smeesters, has revealed the name of a second social psychologist whose data he believes to be suspiciously perfect. That researcher is Lawrence Sanna, whose former employer, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, tells Simonsohn that he resigned his professorship there at the end of May. The reasons for Sanna's resignation are not known, but it followed questions from Simonsohn and a review by Sanna’s previous institution, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (UNC). According to the editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Sanna has also asked that three of his papers be retracted from the journal. In both Smeesters’ and Sanna’s work, odd statistical patterns in the data raised concerns with Simonsohn, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. But the similarity between the cases ends there. Smeesters’ resignation was announced on 25 June by his institution, Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which undertook a review and concluded that two of his papers should be retracted. Sanna’s resignation, by contrast, remains mysterious: UNC did not release the results of its review, and the University of Michigan will not explain why Sanna resigned. Sanna’s research covers areas of psychology including judgement, decision-making and morality. Last year, his work attracted media coverage (and so far, four citations) for showing that people behave more altruistically if they are physically elevated, for example by riding an ascending escalator1. This link between physical height and moral virtue is an example of embodied cognition, a growing area of psychology that looks at how the body and environment influence the mind. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17040 - Posted: 07.14.2012

Analysis by Sheila Eldred If you've seen "Silence of the Lambs," you probably remember the scene where the lights go out on Jodie Foster and the unseen Buffalo Bill reaches out to her. That's because at that moment, your brain was probably at its peak of engagement, according to a study by a team of researchers from The City College of New York and Columbia University. "Peak correlations of neural activity across viewings can occur in remarkable correspondence with arousing moments of the film," the researchers wrote in the journal "Moreover, a significant reduction in neural correlation occurs upon a second viewing of the film or when the narrative is disrupted by presenting its scenes scrambled in time." Tense scenes present prime conditions for peak brain activity. They usually contain at least two of the three components identified by the researchers as most engaging: powerful visual cues, ominous music, and meaningful scene changes. To make the correlation, the researchers hooked 20 subjects up to EEG devices (electroencephalography measures electrical activity across the scalp) as they showed scenes from three films: Alfred Hitchcock's "Bang! You're Dead," Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," and an amateur film of people walking on a college campus as a control. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 17038 - Posted: 07.14.2012

Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr., When you see someone coughing, you reflexively know to steer clear of his or her germs. When you observe someone who is cranky or complaining, it is less obvious what to do. Studies suggest, however, that others' moods may be as easy to catch as their germs. Psychologists call this phenomenon emotional contagion, a three-step process through which one person's feelings transfer to another person. The first stage involves nonconscious mimicry, during which individuals subtly copy one another's nonverbal cues, including posture, facial expressions and movements. In effect, seeing my frown makes you more likely to frown. People may then experience a feedback stage--because you frowned, you now feel sad. During the final contagion stage, individuals share their experiences until their emotions and behaviors become synchronized. Thus, when you encounter a co-worker on a bad day, you may unknowingly pick up your colleague's nonverbal behaviors and begin to morph into an unhappy state. Mimicry is not all bad, however; a person can also adopt a friend or colleague's good mood, which can help enhance their bond. Although mimicry often occurs outside of our awareness, sometimes we can observe it. Let us say you see someone across from you on the train yawn. Often you cannot help but yawn as well. Recent research suggests that this type of mimicry is more common when the person yawning is someone close to you, such as a family member, good friend or romantic partner. Another study revealed that nonconscious mimicry, also dubbed the chameleon effect, occurs more often in more empathetic people. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17034 - Posted: 07.12.2012

By JoNel Aleccia Steve and Dawn Thomas rarely saw their son Brandon blush, and if they did, it wasn’t a worry. Brandon was blond and fair, like his twin brother, Devin, and an occasional flush of color didn’t seem concerning. “We wouldn’t have witnessed it,” said Steve Thomas. “It wasn’t even happening here at home. I think this was his place of comfort.” So they were stunned last fall when Brandon, a friendly, well-liked University of Washington student, confessed to his mother he’d been struggling with crippling, chronic blushing for four years. Steve and Dawn Thomas are speaking out about their son Brandon's death to raise awareness of the little-known disorder estimated to affect between 5 percent and 7 percent of the population. And they were devastated on May 29, when Brandon jumped from the 11th floor balcony of his Seattle dormitory, leaving behind a five-page note blaming his suicide on despair caused by the little-known disorder. “When Brandon finally let us in to his secret life of torment, we were obviously way behind,” his mother said. Six weeks later, the Thomases are speaking out about Brandon’s death to honor his last wish. In the letter, the young man who hid the problem from his friends, his family -- even his twin -- wanted the world to know that there’s nothing trivial about turning red. © 2012 msnbc.com

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17031 - Posted: 07.12.2012

By Kai MacDonald What do a chilly reception, a cold-blooded murder, and an icy stare have in common? Each plumbs the bulb of what could be called your social thermometer, exposing our reflexive tendency to conflate social judgments—estimations of another’s trust and intent — with the perception of temperature. Decades of fascinating cross-disciplinary studies have illuminated the surprising speed, pervasiveness and neurobiology of this unconscious mingling of the personal and the thermal. The blurring of ‘heat’ and ‘greet’ is highlighted in a recent experiment by Ohio University’s Matthew Vess, who asked whether this tendency is influenced by an individual’s sensitivity to relational distress. They found that people high in the psychological attribute called attachment anxiety (a tendency to worry about the proximity and availability of a romantic partner) responded to memories of a relationship breakup with an increased preference for warm-temperature foods over cooler ones: soup over crackers. Subjects low in attachment anxiety — those more temperamentally secure — did not show this “comfort food” effect. In a related part of the same experiment, subjects were asked to reconstruct jumbled words into sentences that had either cold or warm evocations. (Sentence reconstruction tasks involving specific themes are known to unconsciously influence subsequent behavior.) After being temperature-primed, Vess’s subjects rated their perceptions of their current romantic relationship. As in the first condition, subjects higher in attachment anxiety rated their relationship satisfaction higher when prompted with balmier phrases than with frosty ones. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 17023 - Posted: 07.11.2012

Mo Costandi It is often assumed that processes such as visual perception work in the same ways in all people, but research now suggests that how we see things may be influenced by our expectations and opinions. Yair Pinto, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam, and his colleagues asked 45 white Dutch people to perform a binocular rivalry task — a standard tool in visual perception studies. The researchers presented low-contrast images of white, Moroccan and black faces to one eye and high-contrast changing patterns to the other. At first, the study participants were aware of seeing only the patterns. But when the contrast of the patterns was reduced and that of the faces was increased, the patterns became invisible and the faces broke through into the participants' awareness. The researchers asked the participants to indicate when they became aware of seeing the faces by pressing a button on a computer keyboard. It took the participants an average of one-hundredth of a second longer to become aware of the Moroccan and black faces than the white ones. The team also measured participants’ racial biases using the implicit association test, in which participants pair concepts such as 'black' and 'white' with qualities such as 'good' and 'bad'. The participants who exhibited greatest implicit bias in the association test took longest to become aware of the black and Moroccan faces. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 17009 - Posted: 07.07.2012

Mo Costandi How the brain responds to and processes images of people from different racial groups is an emerging field of investigation that could have major implications for society. Psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, in New York, who in 2000 led one of the first studies in this area, tells Nature what her latest review of the field reveals about the neuroscience of race1. What does psychology tell us about race? Social psychologists differentiate between the attitudes that people express and their implicit preferences. This can be studied using the implicit association task, which measures initial, evaluative responses. It involves asking people to pair concepts such as black and white with concepts like good and bad. What you find is that most white Americans take longer to make a response that pairs black with good and white with bad than vice versa. This reveals their implicit preferences. What did your review of the neuroscience literature show? My colleagues and I found that there’s a network of brain regions that is consistently activated in neuroimaging studies of race processing. This network overlaps with the circuits involved in decision-making and emotion regulation, and includes the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). What did your previous work show? Our 2000 study was the first to link race preference to brain activity. We measured the eye-blink startle, a reflex response that people display when they hear a loud noise, for example. A lot of studies have shown that this reflex is potentiated [enhanced] when people are anxious or in the presence of something they think is negative. We found that implicit preferences were correlated with potentiated startle, and that both were correlated with the amount of amygdala activation. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16972 - Posted: 06.27.2012

Jeannine Stamatakis, There is no denying the high you feel after a run in the park or a swim at the beach. Exercise not only boosts your physical health--as one can easily see by watching a marathon or a boxing match--but it also improves mental health. According to a recent study, every little bit helps. People who engaged in even a small amount of exercise reported better mental health than others who did none. Another study, from the American College of Sports Medicine, indicated that six weeks of bicycle riding or weight training eased stress and irritability in women who had received an anxiety disorder diagnosis. To see how much exercise is required to relieve stress, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health observed how prior exercise changed the interactions between aggressive and reserved mice. When placed in the same cage, stronger mice tend to bully the meeker ones. In this study, the small mice that did not have access to running wheels and other exercise equipment before cohabitating with the aggressive mice were extremely stressed and nervous, cowering in dark corners or freezing when placed in an unfamiliar territory. Yet meek rodents that had a chance to exercise before encountering their bullies exhibited resistance to stress. They were submissive while living with the aggressive mice but bounced back when they were alone. The researchers concluded that even a small amount of exercise gave the meeker mice emotional resilience. The scientists looked at the brain cells of these so-called stress-resistant mice and found that the rodents exhibited more activity in their medial prefrontal cortex and their amygdala, both of which are involved in processing emotions. The mice that did not exercise before moving in with the aggressive mice showed less activity in these parts of the brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16958 - Posted: 06.25.2012

By Jesse Bering Once, while in a drowsy, altitude-induced delirium 35,000 feet somewhere over iceland, I groped mindlessly for the cozy blue blanket poking out beneath my seat, only to realize—to my unutterable horror—that I was in fact tugging soundly on a wriggling, sock-covered big toe. Now, with a temperament such as mine, life tends to be one awkward conversation after the next, so when I turned around, smiling, to apologize to the owner of this toe, my gaze was met by a very large man whose grunt suggested that he was having some difficulty in finding the humor in this incident. Unpleasant, sure, but I now call this event serendipitous. As I rested my head back against that sanitation-paper-covered airline pillow, my midflight mind lit away to a much happier memory, one involving another big toe, yet this one belonging to a noticeably more good-humored animal than the one sitting behind me. This other toe—which felt every bit as much as its overstuffed human equivalent did, I should add—was attached to a 450-pound western lowland gorilla, with calcified gums, named King. When I was 20 and he was 27, I spent much of the summer of 1996 with my toothless friend King, listening to Frank Sinatra and the Three Tenors, playing chase from one side of his exhibit to the other, and tickling his toes. He'd lean back in his night house, stick out one huge ashen-gray foot through the bars of his cage and leave it dangling there in anticipation, erupting in shoulder-heaving guttural laughter as I'd grab hold of one of his toes and gently give it a palpable squeeze. He almost couldn't control himself when, one day, I leaned down to act as though I were going to bite on that plump digit. If you've never seen a gorilla in a fit of laughter, I'd recommend searching out such a sight before you pass from this world. It's something that would stir up cognitive dissonance in even the heartiest of creationists. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16950 - Posted: 06.23.2012

by Pamela Weintraub; Jaak Panksepp has taken on many unusual roles in his storied career, but none so memorable as rat tickler: He learned how to stimulate the animals to elicit high-frequency chirps that he identified as laughter. Panksepp’s interspecies game-playing garnered amused media coverage, but the news also stirred up old controversies about human and animal emotions. Since the 1960s, first at Bowling Green State University and later at Washington State University, Panksepp has charted seven networks of emotion in the brain: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. He spells them in all caps because they are so fundamental, he says, that they have similar functions across species, from people to cats to, yes, rats. Panksepp’s work has led him to conclude that basic emotion emerges not from the cerebral cortex, associated with complex thought in humans, but from deep, ancient brain structures, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus. Those findings may show how talk therapy can filter down from the cortex to alter the recesses of the mind. But Panksepp says his real goal is pushing cures up from below. His first therapeutic effort will use deep brain stimulation in the ancient neural networks he has charted to counteract depression. Panksepp recently sat down with DISCOVER executive editor 
Pamela Weintraub at the magazine’s offices in New York City to explain his iconoclastic take on emotion. His new book, The Archaeology of Mind: 
Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion, will be published in July. Your interest in emotion was sparked by an odd job you had in college. What
 happened there?
 © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16861 - Posted: 06.02.2012