Anxiety can feel like a storm that starts deep inside the skull. For years, neuroscientists have known that the amygdala — an ...

The amygdala is a part of the brain important for emotional responses, especially fear. It is thought to be important in anxiety disorders. A new UC Davis study reveals new cell types in different ...

Hasegawa et al. first used a fluorescence-based sensor to measure dopamine levels in the amygdala of mice as they naturally cycled between wakefulness and non-REM and REM sleep. Dopamine release in ...

Have you ever wondered why you jump when you’re startled? Maybe you wonder why you have a harder time handling stress and anxiety than your friends and family do. Part of the reason might lie in your ...

A new study published in Translational Psychiatry provides evidence that posttraumatic stress disorder may be linked to altered communication between specific parts of the amygdala and other brain ...

Research led by Mark Shen, PhD, Heather Hazlett , PhD, and Joseph Piven, MD, from UNC-Chapel Hill is the first to demonstrate overgrowth of the amygdala in the first year of life, before babies show ...

Ramping the resolution The QST research team with the new high-resolution PET scanner. From left to right: Hidekatsu Wakizaka ...

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 ...

The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure in the limbic system of our brain, known for its key function in the cascade of events associated with detecting threat. When the thalamus communicates ...