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 ...

Researchers are pioneering an innovative brain study that sheds light on how the amygdala portion of the brain functions and could contribute to a better understanding of post-traumatic stress ...

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 ...

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, ...

Treating anxiety, depression and other disorders may depend on the amygdala, a part of the brain that controls strong emotional reactions, especially fear. But a deep understanding of this structure ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...