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

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 ...

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, ...

A new study shows that a lack of dietary fiber leads to rapid inflammation in the aging brain's amygdala, impairing emotional memory.

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 ...

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 ...

Drawings of the monkey brain, left, in which each color represents a group of related brain regions. The graph on the right shows how these regions are connected to each other. Each region is ...

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 ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, have discovered a genetically controlled brain mechanism responsible for social behavior in ...