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
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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