The Brain
Emotion and Motivation
Prof: T. Curwen
~ Behind every crooked
thought is a crooked molecule
`anonymous
Overview
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Basics on the brain
Areas of brain involved in emotion
Neurochemicals/neuropeptides
Neuroscience studies of emotion
Plasticity
• Brains ability to repair itself
• Children’s brains show most plasticity
• Plasticity depends on extent of affect
– Damaged
– Destroyed
How the Brain is Studied
1) Brain Lesioning
• Abnormal disruption
• Produced
– Surgically removing
– Destroying with laser
– Injecting a drug
2) Staining
~http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/fmiskevich/Research
EEG
Brain Imaging
http://adam.about.com/reports/000335.htm
PET and MRI scans
Structures of the Brain
• 3 major regions
– Hindbrain – (next to the top of the spinal cord)
– Midbrain – (above the hindbrain)
– Forebrain - (uppermost region of the brain)
Hindbrain
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
Midbrain
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
Forebrain
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
3 Brain Regions
Limbic system
• Forebrain
• Memory and emotion
• Determines what information stays in the
cortex
• 2 primary structures
Amygdala
• object discrimination
• Emotions
Hippocampus
Storage of memories
Forebrain
Multimedia Mgr. 2004
Amygdala
Hippocampus
Hypothalamus
Thalamus
Information movement
To limbic system –
Thalamus, amygdala,
hippocampus
Through sensory motor
System
Stimuli
To cortices
Action
Hemispheres
• Cerebral cortex is divided into 2 hemispheres
Cerebral Cortex
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Most recently developed
Highest mental functions occur here
Connected to other parts of the brain
Millions of connections to other parts of the
brain
Corpus callosum
http://www.indiana.edu/~pietsch/callosum.html#corpus%20callosum
Lobes
• Each hemisphere is divided into 4 lobes
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Occipital lobe
Temporal lobe
Frontal lobe
Parietal lobe
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
Occipital lobe – visual stimuli
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
Temporal lobe
• hearing, language processing, memory
Frontal lobe
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
voluntary muscles, intelligence, language, planning,
judgement, ?personality
Prefrontal cortex – executive control (thought)
www.brainexplorer.org/brain_atlas
Parietal lobe
– spatial, attention, motor control
Brain Division
Brain Regions and
Responsibilities
Emotion
• hemispheric damage
• detect lies
• Does it matter which hemisphere is
damaged?
Why does Neuroscience matter?
• get theoretical insights from neuroscience
• understand emotional processes that are
hard to study
• evolutionary approach
Davidson
• all behavior is approach and avoidance
• How study without neuroscience?
• Evidence
– Hemisphere
– Children
– Other research
Depression in brain
• Melancholia
• Anhedonia
• Hemisphere dominance
Dalai Lama
• Meditation
– Does it change the brain?
– Davidson study
Summary
The Amygdala and Unconscious
Emotional Processing
• LeDoux
– unconscious affective appraisal system
– Support/Research
– Amygdala
• What happens when you knock out the amygdala
Knock out
• Knock out amygdala in monkeys
• Inappropriate emotional responses
• Do not learn from mistakes
Amygdala vs. Hippocampus
• out the amygdala but not the hippocampus
• can’t track the emotional significance of
stimuli
• Can’t compare stimulus
– Hippocampus – memory
• Brain responds to faces
Direct route to action
Stimuli/input
Limbic system
Action
Unconscious emotion
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LeDoux
Classical conditioning
amygdala tracks emotional meaning
infantile amnesia
D’Amasio
• Somatic marker hypothesis
• Feedback
• Research
– Frontal lobe damage
– Gut feeling, intuition
Neuropeptides
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Oxytocin
Dopamine
Norepinephrine
Serotonin
Oxytocin and LOVE
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Love vs. desire
Oxytocin released when touched
Women have 7x’s more oxytocin
Oxytocin promotes monogomy
Chocolate and oxytocin