Fear
The plain sight of only the word fear causes people to flinch. Fear is a feeling that most people have come across at one point in their life. We first come across this feeling when we are kids, people are accustomed to react in several different ways. People live constantly in fear because of the experiences they have encountered. One may be in consistent fear of accidents, people doing bad harm to them and several other personal experiences. Fear, is an emotion that cannot be avoided, it is something experienced by everyone. Fear alters from person to person, but the emotion of fear itself is the same (Greenberg, B. D.). One person’s reaction to seeing spiders will be comparable to another person’s reaction of being in the dark. As soon as the stimulus is known the body is designed to react. The most significant part of the body would be the brain, but it is also the most complex.
One of the main improvements in the learning of memory over time is vastly rising notice that there are several memory systems that are controlled by diverse neural substrates. Studies investigating the impact of emotion on memory have mainly centered on two medial temporal lobe memory systems (Askew, C., 2016). The first is connected to the amygdala and focuses on the processing of emotion. The trademark of this memory system is that it is essential for the attainment and appearance of fear conditioning. The second is connected to the hippocampal complex and is important for declarative or episodic memory. This memory system can be explained to be the main memory system.
Fear is something that large amounts of people have encountered at least once at some point in their lives. It has been said to have caused a variety of outcomes, many of them being largely negative. Therefore, it is a common human response to react to fear by counteracting it with positivity and/or success (Cameron, G., 2014). The idea people have of what fear is depends on the person. Human emotions get the best of us during times of extreme distress, panic, anger, loneliness, etc. We are slaves to our psyche since it is our minds that control and provide our thought process, which directly relates to our own actions. Emotions occur naturally, automatically and are triggered by our surroundings and significant events that leave an impression on us. Emotions are basic human instinct. They are subconscious warnings and reactions to certain situations and to our surroundings.
The amygdala is specialized in detecting threat and includes fearful facial expressions. The researchers of this study hypothesized that amygdala response is greater in individuals of their own culture. Fear is defined as an emotion that is bought on by a threat to an individual's well-being. This is often expressed as anxiety and elicits a reaction in which an individual will choose to 'fight or flight'. A phobia is an intense fear of something specific e.g. an animal or a situation. The reaction towards a phobic stimulus is often irrational and is very often followed by an intense anxiety response. Many psychologists have researched these aspects of human emotions. Fear was initially stated that it is a neural circuit that sustains the network to continue thriving in unsafe circumstances. The signals that are designed to warn off threatening conditions contains routes that send information to the amygdala (Densmore, M., Lanius, R. A., Théberge, J., Rewen, P. A., & Rabellino, D., 2016). When triggering the amygdala it also triggers emotional responses, these can activate responses of freezing or fleeing. There are significant differences to construct among emotions and feelings. Feelings a part of the conscious mind and emotions are noticeable patterns of behaviour of neurons. The factors of fear exists outside feelings and emotions. Following a horrific experience one can recall analytical motives for the experience but they can also “feel” the memory and one will react accordingly. These feelings of the memory are kept in a part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala concerns ones emotions, this includes fear. It also involves other people’s emotions by recognizing facial expressions. When the amygdala is not function properly, people have trouble recognizing other people’s facial expressions (Burman, M., 2016). The limbic system includes the amygdala, it also includes the thalamus, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and olfactory bulb. The amygdala is attached to the hippocampus, it instructs memories of fearful experiences.
Ones memories are usually thought of as our past experiences or parodies, facts or details, which one can/will remember. There are several different types of memory, each of which traces a separate neural pathway. One’s memory is everything but straightforward, it is something very complicated (Askew, C., 2016). For example, rather than one or the other, the same brain can store strengthened or weakened memories of events, depending on the circumstances. Scientists believe stress hormones released by the fear system strengthen memory pathways in our brains, allowing us to easily recall memories of emotional experiences. They call these “flashbulb memories.” If an emotional event becomes too traumatic, however, it can negatively affect memory. Researchers have also found that even though people report vivid recollections related to flashbulb memories, they often swear by details that are in fact flawed.
General research observing the amygdala–hippocampal relations has concentrated on how the amygdala can effect hippocampal-dependent, episodic memory for emotional stimuli. There is plentiful evidence that memories for emotional events have resolution and vividness that other memories lack.
The amygdala and hippocampal complex control two impartial memory systems that relate when emotion meets memory. Although we know more about the mechanisms that underlie the amygdala’s influence on hippocampal-dependent episodic memory, it is not clear how the modulation of attention and encoding complements the modulation of consolidation (Densmore, M., Lanius, R. A., Théberge, J., Rewen, P. A., & Rabellino, D., 2016). It has been suggested that the amygdala primarily enhances episodic memory for the gist of an emotional event at the expense of details, which may be related to attention.
Although most of the research examining amygdala– hippocampal interactions has explored how the amygdala can influence episodic memory, there is also evidence of episodic memory influencing the amygdala. In the typical fear conditioning example, a substance discovers that a neutral stimulus predicts an aversive event by virtue of their pairing. This often occurs in one’s daily life experiences (Cameron, G., 2014). For example, if you are bitten by a dog, the time you see a dog you might be afraid and have a fearful reaction. You response might be similar if the person told you before that their dog might bite you. This type of learning through instruction requires the hippocampal complex for acquisition and, possibly, for retrieval when the fearful stimulus is present. Through instruction, subjects can obtain an episodic representation of the emotional importance of an event without any direct aversive experience.
The principal instruction of the brain is to stimulate and procreation. Consequently, the brain is firm to sense, process, store, perceive and mobilize in response to threatening information from the external and internal environments. All areas of the brain and body are recruited and orchestrated for optimal survival tasks during the threat. This total neurobiological participation in the threat response is important in understanding how a traumatic experience can impact and alter functioning in such a pervasive fashion (Askew, C., 2016). Cognitive, emotional, social, behavioral and physiological residue of a trauma may impact an individual for years – even a lifetime. For any experience, negative or a positive one to become part of memory, it must be experienced by the individual person.