Monday, December 7, 2015


Why is fear taking over the human mind- A closer look at anxiety and fear within a      psychopathic mind.


According to Dr. Mike Koenings, anxiety disorders affect 1 in 4 adults. Many people blame anxiety on their job, family, or personal status.  Fear is a common factor that causes on to feel anxious and have anxiety.  Some anxiety can cause people to become psychopaths and commit to crimes that are not normal and violent. However, fear is a major component to why humans feel anxious and stressed out.
According to the National Institute of mental health, “Many studies have implicated two brain regions in anxiety—the amygdala in fear responses and the ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) in suppressing or regulating fear”. This relates to Dr. Koenings’ study. Dr. Koenings’ states, “
Dysfunction in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is believed to play a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of mood and anxiety disorders. Leading Neurocircuitry models of these disorders propose that hypoactivity in the vmPFC engenders disinhibited activity of the amygdala and, consequently, pathologically elevated levels of negative affect” (Koenings 276). Anxiety can be determined by the brain activity in you amygdala. Along those lines, Dr. Sonia Bishop, Ph.D., of the University of California Berkeley, is studying how fear can activate brain activity in the amygdala and the vPFC.

In Dr. Bishop’s study there are 3 types of fears: cued, contextual and safety. She defines them as follows

-She defines cued fear as, “a neutral signal or cue is followed by an aversive event. In this study, the cue was an actor in a video placing his hands over his ears and the aversive event was a loud scream. The cue provided a reliable prediction of the aversive event. Cued fear can be compared to the situation-specific type of anxiety experienced by those with a specific phobia, such as a fear of heights”(Bishop 2011).
-She later defines contextual fear as, “a neutral cue and an aversive event occur independently of each other. The cue did not provide a reliable prediction of the aversive event. Contextual fear may be similar to the non-specific anxiety that affects people with generalized anxiety disorder” (Bishop 2011).
 -And lastly, she defines safety as, “a neutral signal or cue occurs alone without an aversive event. The safety situation served as a comparison for the other two situations” (Bishop 2011).

    Dr. Bishop’s study was in twenty-three healthy patients who were aged between 18 and 41. Dr. Bishop designed a training session for two days, where her participants will face cued fear, contextual fear, and a safety concern. Once her participants have faced these fears, she later invites hem back to her lab so she can preform a magnetic resonance imaging of their brain, while they are re-exposed to the three different fears though her scanner. The results are as follows, “Participants with high trait anxiety showed greater amygdala response to cued fear situations compared to those with low trait anxiety. According to the researchers, this finding suggests that individual differences in amygdala response may contribute to differences in vulnerability to cue-specific anxiety disorders, such as specific phobia” (Bishop 2011).

However she states that participants who had low traits of anxiety, showed increased brain activity of the vPFC compared to those who showed high traits of anxiety. She believes, “The study's findings support a potential role of the amygdala in vulnerability to anxiety disorders and a potential role of the vPFC in protection against them” (Bishop 2011).

·      This relates to Dr. Koenings’ study because he discusses how people who have a damages vmPFC, do not feel emotion. Dr. Bishop states that people who have a working vPFC cannot feel emotion, but still have amygdala activity. In dr. Koenings’ study people showed significant brain activity in the amygdala, even if their vmPFC was damaged. This explains why psychopathic humans do not feel anxious or fear when they are partaking in something dangerous because they have brain damage, which can inhibit vmPFC activity, thus they do not realize the fear or anxiety someone with normal brain activity would. Dr. Koenings’ states in his lecture, Psychopathic offenders have a reduced integrity of U fasciculus, compared to non-psychopathic offenders, and if you compare vmPFC region it’s less functionally connected in psychopathic offenders compared to non-psychopathic offenders.

However, there is still speculation according to Dr. Koenings. Conventional “top-down amygdala inhibition” model of vmPFC function is incomplete. Dr. Bishop believes that more speculation is needed to provide a better understanding of how anxiety is correlated to amygdala and vPFC. She states, “"Individual differences in the functioning of one or both of these brain regions may help account for the variability in symptoms across different anxiety disorders. A better understanding of these processes may help inform treatment choice and predict treatment response” (Bishop 2011).

The question now stands is there a treatment that can help psychopaths overcome their disability so they can feel emotions again and not partake in criminal activities


 References:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2011/brain-activity-patterns-in-anxiety-prone-people-suggest-deficits-in-handling-fear.shtml https://luc.app.box.com/neuroscienceseminar/1/4972595166/40262591634/1

Pictures:
Amygdala research --https://luc.app.box.com/neuroscienceseminar/1/4972595166/40262591634/1
Magnify Anxiety-- http://www.theperimenopauseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Anxiety-words.jpg
Man stressed --http://refugecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/anxiety1.jpg

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