Review of "Amygdala activity at correlated with long-term, free recall of emotional information"
This article reviewed an experiment that tested the role of the amygdala in emotional memory. To be specific it hypothesized that if the amygdaloid complex (AC) was primarily involved with the formation of long-term memory during emotionally arousing situations, then the PET analysis would reveal AC activity related to retention of the relative emotional, but not relatively neutral, films.
The experiment used eight right-handed male subjects between 20 and 24 years old. While at first it was not clearly stated why the subjects used were all the same, but women, left-handed people, and subjects of differing ages were purposely omitted in favor of right-handed males of a specific age for use as a control. These subjects were shown two videos, one with emotionally neutral film clips (N) and one with emoti
Although Figure 2 was somewhat confusing to the readers, Figure 3 clearly shows a scatterplot relationship that existed between number of films recalled and right amygdala glucose levels in E films with no apparent relationship existing between those two in N films. The experimenters then offer possible explanations as to why the asymmetries between the right and left amygdalas may have occurred, but each of the explanations supported the authors' hypothesis. Because of this fact, the explanations may have been somewhat biased or some explanations may have been purposefully ommitted. Although this may have been biased, the experimenters did not fail to mention that other parts of the brain were associated with memories of emotional nature, without having any apparent role in the formation and retention of neutral memories.
onally arousing film clips (E). Each video contained 12 clips. The subjects were as
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