Amygdala Involved with Social Cognition

Amygdala Involved With Social Cognition

By: Ann-Michelle Vera

Florida Atlantic University

Abstract

The amygdala is an almond shape mass of gray matter with the temporal lobe of the brain, medial to the hypothalamus and adjacent to the hippocampus. The amygdala is part of the limbic system which involves emotions and motivations. The amygdala particularly is responsible for processing emotions such as fear, anger, and pleasure and involved determining what and where memories is stored. This paper aims to explain the interrelate of the amygdala within social cognition, social interaction and interpersonal trust by draw attention to three articles: What Does The Amygdala Contribute To Social Cognition by Ralph Adolph, Bilateral Amygdala Damage Impairs The Acquisition and Use of Common Ground in Social Interaction by Rupa Gupta et al. and The Human amygdala Is Necessary For Developing and Expressing Normal Interpersonal Trust by Timothy R Koscik, And Daniel Tranel.

The amygdala is clearly involved with emotional processing, and socially applicable information. One may identify three generalize functions of the amygdala: social behavior, emotion and reward learning. Studies like Kluver and Bucy (1930), and Brown and Schafer Have (1880) have emphasized these three functions. “The amygdala is extensively connected with many other cortical and subcortical structures, and so accounts of its function will need to do justice to its location in this dense web of connections…It has become apparent that there are substantial individual differences in the amygdala (the extremes of which may contribute to many psychiatric illnesses), as well as substantial effects of context and stimulus history, all of which makes it essential to look at individual and trial-wise details which can get obscured in group-level effects and meta-analyses” (Adolphs, 2010). Through the usages of fMRI on Human and single-unit electrophysiolog in animal has the opne the...