Biological Psych 8: Fear &anxiety (Lec 32) Flashcards
Brief, present/ imminent, specific/clear threat, facilitates escape
vs
prolonged, future focused, diffuse or poorly defined threat, promotes avoidance, caution and hypervigilance.
Which is fear and which is anxiety?
Anxiety is prolonged and nebulous, promoting avoidance, caution and hypervigilance.
Fear is immediate, with a clear threat.
How do panic disorder and agoraphobia differ from generalised anxiety?
Panic disorder involves the occurrence of panic attacks, and agoraphobia results in not going out to avoid panic attacks.
Generalised anxiety is chronic, accompanied by muscle tension, hyperarousal and symptoms of fight or flight response.
Social phobia, OCD and PSD, which is the most common phobia disorder and which is no longer considered an anxiety disorder?
PSD is no longer considered an anxiety disorder.
Social phobia (eg fear of public speaking, extreme shyness) is the most common phobia disorder
A series of structures in the brain which form a loop between the hypothalamus and the cortex is called:
The limbic system
Papez was the first to discover the loop which goes from the mediatemporal lobe projecting through the thalamus, hypothalamus and the cortex, this is called:
What is it responsible for? describe 2 connected aspects…
The limbic system
The limbic system is responsible for organising emotional experiences with physiological emotional responses, and learning when to generate these responses.
The limbic cortex is just above the _____ _____
corpus callosum
The amygdala has outputs to all the major physiological brain systems, which govern e____ r_____
emotional responses
Which part of the brain is important for emotional perception and determining how genuine an emotion being conveyed is?
The amygdala
How would lesions of the amygdala effect activation of the visual cortex when viewing pictures of fearful faces?
Lesions of the amygdala reduce visual cortex activation when viewing fearful faces
Albert wasn’t scared of rats. After a series of rat exposures, whereby the experimenter hit Albert on the head every time he saw a white rat, Albert started to cry, even in the absence of the head hit.
What type of conditioning is this? Name the different aspects (rat, head-hit and fear) of the experiment. Give some examples of generalisation which then followed this.
This is pavlovian, or classical conditioning.
The head-hit is the US (unconditioned stimulus) and the rat is a neutral stimulus. The fear reaction is the UR.
Generalisation of the CR is the same response occurring for similar US, such as white rabbits, fur coats, etc.
???? Check this w Jenny!
After being exposed to a 30s tone followed by a brief electric shock, how do rats react when they’re
1: Placed back in the same chamber
2. Placed in a different chamber but played the same 30s tone?
What does this tell us about the amygdala-based fear learning system?
In both instances the rats freeze in fear
This shows us that the amygdala helps us to associate cues with the likelihood of an unwanted event, resulting in fear
What was the result of experimentally lesioning the hippocampus for rats?
What about the rats w an amygdala lesion?
Rats w hippocampus lesions were not able to memorise fear cues for location where the unpleasant event took place. The hippocampus is involved w memory forming as well as spatial information.
Amygdala lesion completely eradicated fear-learning.
A change in sweat glands in your skin can indicate a change in _____ arousal
Sympathetic arousal
In an experiment involving a patient with damage to the amygdala (patient A), damage to the amygdala and hippocampus (patient AH) and damage to the hippocampus only (patient H), a difference was measured following a fear conditioning stimulus. Before a very loud noise was played, a blue screen was shown to the subjects. When the same blue screen was shown, only one patient showed a change in sympathetic arousal. Which patient was it, and why?
Which subjects were unable to recall the colour/s of the screen during the experiment, and why?
What was the interesting cross-over for one of the subjects in the above results?
Which subject showed no memory of the colour or fear response?
Patient H, because they were the only subject without an amygdala lesion
Patients H and AH were unable to recall the colours shown, since they both had hippocampal lesions.
Patient H, who had a hippocampal lesion but an intact amygdala, was unable to recall what colour they had seen before the loud noise, but when presented with that colour again, they still showed a physiological fear response. This shows that the fear response operates on a subconscious level.
Patient AH showed no fear response or memory of the colour shown
