MARKET 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Autonomic Nervous System, Tryptophan, Lobotomy
Document Summary
Introduction to psychology 1: cognitive and biological psychology. Why are we so emotional: the way we behave is clearly influenced by our subjective feelings about events our emotions. All animals, including people, have to do certain things to survive as a species eat, defend themselves from danger and reproduce. Our emotions encourage us to do these things: brain systems that generate emotional behaviours are rooted deep in our evolutionary past. The area of the brain that is primarily involved in generating emotional responses = the limbic system. A network of areas is involved in emotional responses: emotional stimuli range from hearing a funny story to a real- life encounter with a gang of muggers, emotional stimuli are relayed by our sensory systems to the amygdala. Changes then fed back to the frontal cortex which interprets the emotion. The amygdala and emotional behaviour: the amygdala forms part of the limbic system.