Schachter's Role In Fear Conditioning

Knowing how to describe or even define an emotion can be a challenge, but when we are frightened there are both a physiological appearance as well as an emotional response that are equally responsible for our processing of the stimulus. Emotions are said to have components that include cognitions, feelings, and action. Some emotions can be learned responses to a certain stimuli, especially when they are paired with a fear response. Inducing these responses have become a common method of studying of learning and understanding how emotions work and the findings have been quite interesting.
There have been many different theories as to how we interpret stimuli in order to achieve an emotional response, one of which is Schachter’s two factor theory. …show more content…
For this example, the conditioning stimulus will be a bell ring, the unconditioned stimulus is a shock, and the unconditioned response will be fear. Fear can be stimulated when the bell ring is paired with a shock enough times that eventually, when the bell would ring, the body would automatically respond as though the shock had occurred. The association is so strong that even without the actual shock, the fear of receiving a shock can still be stimulated. The amygdala plays a role in fear conditioning because without it no fear is displayed; without it there is no way to condition fear in an individual or an …show more content…
This occurs first by auditory information, such as a loud noise, travelling to the cochlear nucleus in the medulla and from there directly to an area in the pons that causes the tensing of the muscles. This is a defense mechanism that takes less than a second to occur. The central amygdala’s role in this occurs as it receives sensory input from other parts of the amygdala and sends output to areas that relay information to a nucleus in the pons which as we know cause the tensions. The processing of information goes through these channels to produce the same reaction, the startle