Researchers find that the amygdala is a sophisticated mediator that chooses between action-based and stimulus-based learning ...

One of the characteristics of depression is a tendency to perceive sensory stimuli and everyday situations in an excessively negative way. But the mechanisms underpinning this 'negativity bias,' which ...

Neuroimaging measures of emotional brain function after acute trauma may help predict whether a person will develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a new study. The study reports an ...

Picture a star-shaped cell in the brain, stretching its spindly arms out to cradle the neurons around it. That's an astrocyte, and for a long time, scientists thought its job was caretaking the brain, ...

Fear is an adaptive emotion that helps us cope with threatening situations. Deep within the temporal lobe of the brain is the amygdala, the most studied brain area involved in fear. The amygdala uses ...

A Dartmouth study challenges the conventional view that the amygdala-the two-sided structure deep in the brain involved in emotion, learning, and decision making-is simply the brain's primitive "fear ...

"Knowledge of pain mechanisms is key for the development of new analgesics, but understanding the complexity of pain from the detection of a painful event to the feeling and conscious perception of ...

The amygdala is a brain structure known to play a pivotal role in emotion, and has become the focus of interest to neuroscientists and the lay public in recent years. Rapid progress has been made in ...