Amygdala activity essays

Amygdala activity essays Review of "Amygdala activity at correlated with long-term, free recall of emotional information" This article reviewed an experiment that tested the role of the amygdala in emotional memory. To be specific it hypothesized that if the amygdaloid complex (AC) was primarily involved with the formation of long-term memory during emotionally arousing situations, then the PET analysis would reveal AC activity related to retention of the relative emotional, but not relatively neutral, films. The experiment used eight right-handed male subjects between 20 and 24 years old. While at first it was not clearly stated why the subjects used were all the same, but women, left-handed people, and subjects of differing ages were purposely omitted in favor of right-handed males of a specific age for use as a control. These subjects were shown two videos, one with emotionally neutral film clips (N) and one with emotionally arousing film clips (E). Each video contained 12 clips. The subjects were asked to rank each film on the basis of emotionality from 0 (being the lowest) to 10 (being the highest.) The videos were also ranked on how well the subject understood each film on a scale from 0 to 10. The E and N films did not differ in their level of understandability. The films were ordered in such a way that it would maximize the chances of detecting glucose differences between E and N sessions. Since positron emission tomography was used, this was a good idea because most of the measured activity would relfect the first 15-20 minutes of tracer reuptake. Three weeks after the experiment, the subjects were asked to recall as many film clips as possible from both film sessions. As expected the E films were ranked significantly higher than the N films. The subjects could also recall more E films than N films when asked three weeks after the experiment. The scientific paper presents simple, but effect, graphs showing the discrepancies b ...