Connection Between Brain Structure and Emotional Response Essay Sample
Anger and frustrations are emotions that are elicited from everyone even so understanding how and when people become angry has yet to be studied in children intensively. Researchers have been interested in how brain structures affect the emotional response, but most studies focusing on children are limited. Therefore, studying the morphology of brain structures in children will help researchers understand the relationship the brain has to emotional responses during younger stages of life.
Many believe that aggressive behavior in children is normal and part of child development. While this is true in most cases, Roberts et al., (2021) longitudinal study revealed that children with lower aggression have positive amygdala (smaller amygdala size growth) development compared to children who with higher aggression levels. This means that children with positive amygdala growth follow the normative pattern, which is synchronous. Children whose patterns are asynchronous (large amygdala growth) will possibly have a more challenging time responding appropriately in social situations. Thus, aggressive behaviors may be associated with alternation in normative brain development (Robers et al., 2021) but the results were not corrected for comparisons, which sets limitations on this study. More studies must be conducted to investigate brain development across early childhood and late childhood to better understand proactive and reactive aggression. The distinction of aggression will highlight the relationships between the forms of aggression and weed out confounding influences of disruptive symptoms which were not accounted for in this study.
Another study focused on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To understand how the amygdala functions in children with ASD, researchers split 57 children ages 8-16 into 3 groups: ASD with disruptive behavior (DBD), ASD without DBD, and typically developing children. It was revealed that those with ASD co-concurring with DBD have a decrease in connectivity between the amygdala as well as the right of the prefrontal cortex (Ibrahim et al., 2019). While a pattern was detected, like it was in Robert’s study, the results did not have significant differences in the amygdala and connectivity between the three groups. The study was still useful though as it sheds light on the concept that there is a pattern or relationship between the amygdala and brain development. Both the amygdala and prefrontal cortex have a crucial role in the neurological control of aggression. It is possible that if another study was conducted with a larger sample size, researchers may yield different results and the results may be more representative.
Finally, a study conducted by Gilliam et al (2015) focused on the relationships of depressed mothers and sons at a socio-economic risk for behavior problems. The purpose of the study was to examine the relative sizes of the amygdala and hippocampal volume and how it impacts aggression. Those whose mother’s depression ranked moderately had significantly higher rates of aggression compared to those who had mothers with low maternal depression. This suggests that maternal depression may negatively impact the amygdala size and hippocampal volume of their offspring. The amygdala and hippocampal ratios have a positive correlation with reactive aggression. More neuroimaging studies are needed to specify when and how the brain volumes develop in relation to one another in addition to maternal depressive symptoms. These studies serve to suggest that more research must be conducted to understand the mechanisms to how the amygdala and brain development affects children. While numerous research has indicated a correlation between the amygdala and aggression there have been many limitations.
The purpose of the current study was to analyze how the brain structure is tied to emotional response, specifically aggression. It was hypothesized that participants with amygdala damage are related to aggression. It was also hypothesized that reactive aggression will be related to proactive aggression. Specifically, it was predicted that those with amygdala damage would complete the competitive reaction time task (CRTT) faster compared to those in the control condition. Furthermore, it was also predicted that those who complete the CRTT quicker would induce a louder or a longer duration of noise blast than those in the control condition.
