Human Brain Is Divided On Fear and Panic: Different Areas of Brain Responsible for External, Internal Threats
Feb. 4, 2013 — When doctors at the University of Iowa prepared a patient to inhale a panic-inducing dose of carbon dioxide, she was fearless. But within seconds of breathing in the mixture, she cried for help, overwhelmed by the sensation that she was suffocating.
The patient, a woman in her 40s known as SM, has an extremely rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease that has caused extensive damage to the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the brain long known for its role in fear. She had not felt terror since getting the disease when she was an adolescent.
In a paper published online Feb. 3 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the UI team provides proof that the amygdala is not the only gatekeeper of fear in the human mind. Other regions — such as the brainstem, diencephalon, or insular cortex — could sense the body’s most primal inner signals of danger when basic survival is threatened.
“This research says panic, or intense fear, is induced somewhere outside of the amygdala,” says John Wemmie, associate professor of psychiatry at the UI and senior author on the paper. “This could be a fundamental part of explaining why people have panic attacks.“
nterestingly, the amygdala-damaged patients had no fear leading up to the test, unlike the healthy participants, many who began sweating and whose heart rates rose just before inhaling the carbon dioxide. That, of course, was consistent with the notion that the amygdala detects danger in the external environment and physiologically prepares the organism to confront the threat.
“Information from the outside world gets filtered through the amygdala in order to generate fear,” Feinstein says. “On the other hand, signs of danger arising from inside the body can provoke a very primal form of fear, even in the absence of a functioning amygdala.”
- New Study Contends Different Areas Of Brain Responsible For External Versus Internal Threats (medicalnewstoday.com)
- Humans Can Feel Terror Even If They Lack Brain’s ‘Fear Center’ (scientificamerican.com)
- Human brain is divided on fear and panic (sciencedaily.com)
“Give sorrow words.” – Malcolm in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
Can simply describing your feelings at stressful times make you less afraid and less anxious?
A new UCLA psychology study suggests that labeling your emotions at the precise moment you are confronting what you fear can indeed have that effect.
The psychologists asked 88 people with a fear of spiders to approach a large, live tarantula in an open container outdoors. The participants were told to walk closer and closer to the spider and eventually touch it if they could.
The subjects were then divided into four groups and sat in front of another tarantula in a container in an indoor setting. In the first group, the subjects were asked to describe the emotions they were experiencing and to label their reactions to the tarantula – saying, for example, “I’m anxious and frightened by the ugly, terrifying spider.”
“This is unique because it differs from typical procedures in which the goal is to have people think differently about the experience – to change their emotional experience or change the way they think about it so that it doesn’t make them anxious,” said Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology at UCLA and the senior author of the study. “Here, there was no attempt to change their experience, just to state what they were experiencing.” …
- That giant tarantula is terrifying, but I’ll touch it: Expressing your emotions can reduce fear (sciencedaily.com)
- That Giant Tarantula Is Terrifying, but I’ll Touch It (zen-haven.dk)
- Expressing Your Emotions Can Reduce Fear (sott.net)
- ‘That Giant Tarantula Is Terrifying, but I’ll Touch It’ – Expressing Your Emotions Can Reduce Fear (psychologicalscience.org)
- That giant tarantula is terrifying, but I’ll touch it (universityofcalifornia.edu)
- That giant tarantula is terrifying, but I’ll touch it (eurekalert.org)
- Speaking Out Your Fears Helps You Face Them (techie-buzz.com)
- How To Live Fearlessly (psychologicalscience.org)
- Fear, Spiders and the Perception of Threat (psmag.com)
An Indiana University of Pennsylvania sociologist’s study of mixed martial arts competitors found that these men have unique ways of managing fear that actually allow them to exhibit confidence.
This ability, which Dr. Christian A. Vaccaro and colleagues call “managing emotional manhood,” is both an interactional strategy for managing emotion and a means for conveying a social identity to others. The study finds that successful management of fear by men in contact sports such as mixed martial arts may “create an emotional orientation that primes men to subordinate and harm others.” …
…”Putting on a convincing manhood act requires more than using language and the body; it also requires emotion work. By suppressing fear, empathy, pain, and shame and evoking confidence and pride, males signify their alleged possession of masculine selves,” Vaccaro said.
“By signifying masculine selves through evoking fear and shame in others, such men are likely to more easily secure others’ deference and accrue rewards and status. Managing emotional manhood, whether it occurs in a locker room or boardroom, at home or the Oval Office, likely plays a key role in maintaining unequal social arrangements.”
- MMA fighters manage fear in ways that allow them to exhibit confidence (scienceblog.com)
- Study explores men’s ability to manage fear in ways that allow them to exhibit confidence (eurekalert.org)
- Raising Boys to be Real Men (growingupwell.org)
One group of nerve cells in the brain controls the fear behaviour (right). This can be suppressed by a second group of nerve cells (left) — but the fear is only masked, and has not disappeared completely. (Credit: Carlos Toledo/Bernstein Center Freiburg)
ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2011) — Fear is a natural part of our emotional life and acts as a necessary protection mechanism. However, fears sometimes grow beyond proportions and become difficult to shed. Scientists from Freiburg, Basel and Bordeaux have used computer simulations to understand the processes within the brain during the formation and extinction of fears.
In the current issue of the scientific journal PLoS Computational Biology [full text of article], Ioannis Vlachos from the Bernstein Center Freiburg and colleagues propose for the first time an explanation for how fears that were seemingly overcome are in reality only hidden
The reason for the persistency of fears is that, literally, their roots run deep: Far below the cerebral cortex lies the “amygdala,” which plays a crucial role in fear processes. Fear is commonly investigated in mice by exposing them simultaneously to a neutral stimulus — a certain sound, for example — and an unpleasant one. This leads to the animals being frightened of the sound as well. Context plays an important role in this case: If the scaring sound is played repeatedly in a new context without anything bad happening, the mice shed their fear again. It returns immediately, however, if the sound is presented in the original, or even a completely novel context. Had the mice not unlearned to be frightened after all?