In addition to Davids (well done!) comments below are the recent findings
from a couple of labs (most are associated in some way with Hare's research
and use his psychopathy scale); notably is the research of Intrator (sp?)
at the Bronx VA hospital (I seem to remember a pub date of about 93). They
had normals and psychopaths respond to "emotional" words thrown into a list
of neutral words. The normals (PET scans) amygdalas "lit up" when shown
emotional words but the psychopaths (again defined based on Hare
psychopathy scores) showed little or no activity. Their broad
(overgeneralization, IMHO) interpretation is that psychopaths amygdalas
don't perform the "stamp" of emotion onto the memory during consolidation.
Thus they are socialized but without the normal understandings of emotions
in others, etc. Further research has been and is being done by Andra Smith
and Kent Kiehl in a federal prision in Vancover. This is just peripheral to
my own reading so most of my experience with the literature is second hand
sources: thus my hesitancy to say too much about its validity or possible
problems with the designs of the experiments (sic).
Tim S.
>I find it helpful to think of the amygdala as having two broad
>memory-related functions:
>
>1) It puts an emotional "stamp" on declarative memories that are to be
>consolidated by the hippocampus, or at least it tells the hippocampus
>what's important enough to consolidate. (One possible anatomical
>substrate for this, found in rats: a projection from the basolateral
>amygdala that can enhance hippocampal LTP.)
>
>2) It consolidates and perhaps stores "emotional memories"
>(conditioned emotional responses). There's rodent data and human PET
>data on this. I always speculated that relative sparing of the
>amygdala in Alzheimer's disease could help account for the relative
>sparing of patients' emotional responsiveness (e.g. Grandpa grins
>when he sees you because he knows you're someone he loves--he's just
>not sure _who_; Grandma refuses to reenter the room where she had a
>frustrating neuropsych test). In support of that idea, a study
>published this year in _American Journal of Psychiatry_ showed that AD
>patients' degree of emotional memory was correlated with the volume of
>the amygdala (and not of the hippocampus).
>
>Sorry; no references--wrote this from memory.
>
>--David Epstein
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________________
Timothy O. Shearon, PhD
Albertson College of Idaho
Department of Psychology
2112 Cleveland Blvd
Caldwell, Idaho
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
208-459-5840
