Katie Moeller
I found this week’s chapter from LeDoux to be perhaps one of the most interesting we have read so far. Part of this could be because I feel that the further into the book (and into our class discussions) that I get, the better able I am to place LeDoux’s ideas within the context of the other readings about emotions that we’re doing. As his point becomes clearer with more and more evidence and support, so too am I clearer on how his work on the fear system both feeds into and is fed by discussions of other concepts concerning emotions.
In addition to those factors, I was also really intrigued by Chapter 8 because it is primarily focused on anxiety, a topic in which I have both academic and personal interest. One of my conference papers last semester looked at the role of anxiety in our first years of life as primarily adaptive, and one of the ways that we all learn to predict and navigate the many “dangers” of the world. While I was working primarily within a psychoanalytic framework, much of what I learned through my project correlates with LeDoux’s assessment of anxiety as a type of fear, often unresolved and related to an internal rather than an external stimulus. I was happy to see that LeDoux clarifies that anxiety in and of itself is not pathological, because while people see to have an easy time excusing their own fear reactions or the fear reactions of others (perhaps because it is easier to locate a “cause”), it seems that the very fact of anxiety makes many people anxious and uncomfortable.
I was particularly struck by Miller’s experiments, which LeDoux describes on page 233. After a phase of basic fear conditioning in which a buzzer signified a shock, rats learned to jump over a hurdle, in order to avoid the shock. Thus, the rats jumped the hurdle at every buzzer, even if the shock was turned off. While originally the rats jumping the hurdle would shut off the buzzer, Miller then left the buzzer on until the rats learned to press a lever. He then stopped the lever from controlling the buzzer, and chose something else. The rats were able to learn these new responses in succession, even though the original shock was never again administered with the buzzer. What Miller felt this illustrated, and what I found fascinating, was the incredible strength of fear as a motivator, and the lengths that living creatures will go to in order to avoid the recurrence of a painful or uncomfortable situation. This illustration seemed to me to be very indicative of how anxiety works, and the way in which, as a self-protective measure, our fear of one situation can lead us to avoid not only that particular scenario, but also other scenarios that we associate with the original scenario, because of some intermediate trigger which may have been completely unrelated to our original discomfort.
Another element of LeDoux’s examination of anxiety that I was very interested in was the role the amygdala plays in laying down unconscious memories of a traumatic learning situation. Because the amygdala has been described as the “quick and dirty” route for processing emotions - producing coarser, less specific assessments than the cortical regions - it makes sense that in certain types of anxious responses there is not as clear a picture of the cause of the response. LeDoux writes, “The subcortical pathway, not being very capable of making fine distinctions, may produce learning that more freely spreads to other stimuli,” (p. 255).
As a person who has dealt with some recurrent anxiety in my life, I can confirm that from an insider perspective, this is what anxiety feels like; it feels like it is coarse, unpredictable, and widely generalized. While there are specific situations in which I can expect to feel a certain level of anxiety (with all its lovely features - butterflies in my stomach, blushing, shakiness, etc.), there are also at times these total curveball situations in which I feel myself having the anxious reactions before I am even aware of why I am anxious. When I do finally get the chance to cognitively assess the response, I am often a bit perplexed about what exactly triggered my anxiety at that time, and whether or not I can then expect to react in a similar way the next time I face that situation again.
LeDoux points out that in trying to determine the origin of an anxious response there is added complexity because as a result of stress levels and chemicals associated with increased stress, a conscious memory of the traumatic learning experience is not always stored. Nevertheless, because the amygdala is still hard at work even despite stress (and maybe working harder, for that matter), it is possible to form and store “very powerful, implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p. 245) that can stay with us and affect our behavior without our knowledge of why. Especially interesting to me, in light of my presentation with Molly last week on flashbulb memory, is the fact that while the intensity of our anxious and phobic responses do seem influenced by the level of personal meaning associated with the triggering object or stimulus, this does not necessarily guarantee that our memory of the original learning condition is vivid, let alone accessible.
4 comments:
Like the amygdala, affect is promiscuous according to Clore and Huntsinger's article. In reading about anxiety, I could not help but think back to the jury study addressed in the Clore/Huntsinger article. I found this article fascinating! It was not new to me to think about affect having an impact on other things. On a happy day, I usually do feel better about my life. On a "bad" day a bit less optimistic. It is also very obvious to me in my life that rain or shine does make a big difference in my mood. What was fascinating to me was the difference attribution of the cause of affect made.
In the case of the jurors they were feeling distress. It is not surprising that as their distress rose due to greater detail, the the more liable they held the accounting firm. However, the fact that those jurors asked about their pre-case anxiety were not as affected by the level of distressing information they received in regards to the case. It seems that it is not that their disstress didn't rise, but that they had somewhere to pin this distress. Being able to pin it on anxiety due to having to make a decision, they did not have to "pin it on" the accounting firm.
The article is full of examples of affect altering everything for jurors to moral judgements to ability to face challenges. After reading the article one has to question if we ever make decisions based on fact. My feeling, at this point, is no.
Suzanne Ardanowski
The Feeling Brain
3-11-08
The Ledoux reading was particularly interesting to me this week as well. The distinction between the different anxiety disorders was helpful. I never thought of symptoms of anxiety as “being reinforced because it reduces neurotic misery” and as therefore conditioned responses. This is quite obvious when said, but reminds me why it is so difficult to stop these “habits” that one may not necessarily consciously like, but continue to do because it does the trick of reducing anxiety (as in the case of OCD).
The preparedness theory helps explain why fear does not extinguish easily. Ledoux states that in his theory, Ohman believes “phobics are super prepared genetically to respond to the objects of their phobia.” He then explains that in working with phobics, Ohman was able to elicit the prepared conditioning in the absence of awareness of the conditioned stimuli. How is this possible?
The cell assemblies idea is fascinating, and I thought it is truly amazing that the interaction between the cells remained even though the triggers of the memory are no longer effective in eliciting the response. Why does this still happen? Ledoux says that unconscious fear memories are burned into the brain…..kind of a depressing thought, but necessary in a evolutionary sense I suppose, for the fears which help our survival-but what about those nagging, say more irrational fears that aren’t? Why are those not easier to or even possible to extinguish?
In thinking about my own question, is it because fear, whether rational or not, is still fear, thus resulting in a fear response, which by definition is really impossible to ever truly extinguish?
First of all, thank you for an honest and very personal response that summarized well the many ideas Le Doux outlines in this chapter; it was also one of my favorite ones.
The idea that one of our human traits is to experience anxiety as a defense mechanism like animals experience fear, for our survival, does not seem to be satiable in my mind. It is inevitable that anxiety can be positive, because it is well grounded in real facts and will indeed protect us in the face of danger. Though the anxiety disorder, that so often occurs in our modern culture, hipper anxiety so to say, can indeed be our tragic downfall. Must this duality of anxiety co-exist to exist at all? (I mean the mind stimulated anxiety and the event stimulated anxiety) When one experiences a traumatic event, like Freud’s Hans, where afterwards every horse might re-awaken the then experienced ‘flash bulb memory’—which of course by this point has undergone emotional transitions—but all memory systems (implicit and explicit) will be reactivated. What remains incoherent is why we are phobic without a trauma? Is stress the keyword to remembrance or explosion of an intense emotional event? This seems a bit vague of an explanation to me. What is most interesting is then the idea of false and real memories recreating the emotional experience; but as you said for the one who undergoes the memory, weather false anxious alarm or real, it is real in our brains mind.
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