Which side of brain deals with emotions

What Part of the Brain Controls Emotions?
Emotions: cerebral hemispheres and prefrontal cortex - MCAT - Khan Academy

Countless online quizzes can let you know if you are left brained or right brained in a series of easy-to-answer questions. Despite this general assumption of how the brain is laid out, the answer is way more complex than that. Different parts of the brain may overlap and share duties because the brain believes there may be similarities between two different tasks. A new study involving emotion in music is showing how the brain find speech and melody to be similar, that instead of the right side determining if a song is happy or sad, it's actually parts of the left side that have that task.

What Parts of the Human Brain Correspond to Emotion or Love?

Previous studies have shown individuals with semantic dementia SD have trouble recognizing facial expressions of emotion. The difficulty is due to damage of the amygdala, which is located on the right side of the brain. Contextual knowledge, such as meaning based on language, is lost in individuals with SD compared to more episode-based memory loss in Alzheimer's. Researchers wanted to determine if patients with SD also had difficulty processing emotion expressed in other ways, such as music.

For the study, 11 patients with SD, 12 patients with Alzheimer's disease and 20 individuals with neither disease were exposed to new music and unfamiliar faces and were asked to determine if the songs were happy, sad, peaceful or angry. MRI's were also taken to determine brain activity in the damaged parts of the patients with SD and Alzheimer's.

  • related stories?
  • bmw motorbike finance deals?
  • amazon gift card deals 2019.

Patients with SD and Alzheimer's had trouble determining facial and emotional expression especially if a song was sad or angry. Emotions, like fear and love, are carried out by the limbic system, which is located in the temporal lobe.

Navigation menu

While the limbic system is made up of multiple parts of the brain, the center of emotional processing is the amygdala, which receives input from other brain functions, like memory and attention. Shaped like an almond, the amygdala is responsible for multiple emotional responses, like love, fear, anger and sexual desire.

Which area of your brain controls emotions?

Previous studies have shown individuals with semantic dementia SD have trouble recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Languages Add links. The two hemispheres have a complementary specialization for control of different aspects of emotion. In addition to initiating the fight-or-flight response, the amygdala also plays a role in fear learning. Altered lateralisation of emotional prosody processing in schizophrenia. Electrodermal palmar asymmetry and nostril dominance. As these hormones enter the bloodstream, you might notice some physical changes, such as an increase in:.

Shippensburg University states that in animal studies, stimulation or removal of the amygdala alters the emotional response: Therefore, damage to the amygdala can result in abnormal emotional responses, and overstimulation causes excessive reactions. The hippocampus is another part of the limbic system that sends information to the amygdala.

Emotional lateralization

One of the memory processing centers of the brain, the hippocampus interacts with the amygdala when a person has memories with emotional ties. The prefrontal cortex, located near the front of the head, is involved in decision making in response to emotions. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research states that the prefrontal cortex controls what decision a person makes when faced with an emotional reaction, and also regulates anxiety.

The hypothalamus, also a part of the limbic system, feeds information into the amygdala. Shippensburg University states that the hypothalamus acts as a regulator of emotion, controlling levels of sexual desire, pleasure, aggression and anger.