The age of fear

“The initial learning and subsequent behavioral expression of fear are often viewed as independent processes with potentially unique neural substrates. Laboratory animal studies of Pavlovian fear conditioning suggest that the amygdala is important for both forming stimulus associations and for subsequently expressing learned behavioral responses. In the present article, human amygdala activity was studied during the autonomic expression of conditional fear in two differential conditioning experiments … These results indicate that amygdala activity may specifically reflect the expression of learned fear responses and support the position that this region plays a central role in the expression of emotional reactions.” In Cheng, D. et al. ‘Human Amygdala Activity During the Expression of Fear Responses’. Behavioural Neuroscience, V. 120 (5), Dec. 2006.