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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Neurodegenerative disease profoundly affects structures and pathways responsible for memory, cognition, and higher-order ...

It is estimated that more than 100 million U.S. adults are affected by chronic pain, a condition that annually costs the country an estimated $560-635 billion in health care costs, disability and lost ...

The brain’s primitive “fear center” may be much more than that, as new research on the amygdala suggests it plays a crucial ...

The Brain's Chemical Alarm System Kicks In When you experience terror, emotional arousal triggers a surge of norepinephrine in the amygdala. Norepinephrine is similar to adrenaline in that it ...

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

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 ...