Fear Conditioning and the Brain (1 of 2)

During fear conditioning, a neutral stimulus (NS) such as a tone or a picture of a human face is briefly presented followed by an unconditioned stimulus (US), such as a mild electric shock. The result is a conditioned fear response to the CS. A procedure like this has been used to compare fear responses in people diagnosed with psychopathy with control participants. The brain images show that those with psychopathy (right image) have very little responding in their emotional brain circuitry when presented with the CS. In contrast, control participants show strong activation in their emotional brain centers (left image) (Birbaumer et al., 20