Table 1: Areas of the Brain Amygdala
● Part of the limbic system, which is the center for emotions, behavior, and memory ● Highly active in fight-or-flight mode ● Functions in regulating anxiety, aggression, fear conditioning, emotional memory, and social cognition ● Has been identified as playing a role in disease processes such as anxiety and depression, sleep debt, and anger issues ● Is roughly 10% of the volume of the brain ● Part of the brain thought to be involved in executive functions related to the social, emotional, and motivational aspects of behavior ● Involved in higher levels of thought and interconnected throughout the brain ● Thought to contribute to our individual personality ● Functions in self-knowledge, motivation, emotional regulation, and updating goal-directed behavior ● Plays a major role in semantic processes of auditory and verbal stimuli ● Is associated with the representation of semantic knowledge ● Injuries to this area are highlighted by impairment to verbal and nonverbal semantic knowledge ● Not certain the roles this area plays in daily life ● Is a highly connected and metabolically active area ● May a play a primary role in supporting internally directed cognition such as emotions, memory, and meditation ● Functional imaging shows abnormalities with disease processes such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and depression
Prefrontal cortex
Medial prefrontal cortex
Anterior temporal cortex/lobes
Posterior cingulate cortex
Precuneus
● A highly active area of the brain during the conscious resting state ● One of the largest network hubs in the brain ● Processes visual information ● Involved in attention, mental imagery, music processing, and spatial navigation
Temporoparietal junction ● Involved in attention focusing and updating representations from the environment ● Activated when searching for information from memories to make inferences about people and situations ● Active in understanding memory and the social domain together Note: From AbuHasan et al., 2022; Hoffman et al., 2015; Leech & Sharp, 2013; Pedrazzini & Ptak, 2019; Tanaka & Kirino, 2021
Evidence-Based Consideration A 2015 study by Reihl and colleagues used fMRI to compare brain images with the length of time participants were shown a stimulus. When viewing the image for 2 seconds, the brain lit up more, mainly in the prefrontal cortex, than when the image was viewed for 8 seconds. The lateral prefrontal cortex was activated when participants were shown photographs related to stigmas. However, the areas of the brain that lit up differed according to the length of time the participant was allowed to look at the photographs. Our brain uses categorizing to simplify stimuli from the environment. Biases come from social categorization, which defines our social identity, the basis for deriving our self- esteem (Sellaro et al., 2015). Unconscious thought happens very quickly through a coding or categorizing process. The brain uses coding to quickly determine two concepts, like us (in-group) or not like us (out-group), and nonthreatening or threatening. When the brain determines that someone is not like us, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is activated. When the brain codes that someone is like us, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex is activated.
Video: Stereotyping
When the brain codes threatening, the activity shifts to the emotional area of our brain, the amygdala. The brain's emotional area interprets and usually reacts incorrectly much more quickly than the analytical area because the amygdala plays a significant role in deciding and activating our fight-or-flight mode. This information brings into question whether how our brain codes someone determines healthcare professionals' interest in the person's overall well-being and the amount of empathy offered. There is an identified correlation between the preference's strength and the amygdala's activation. Because our reactions from unconscious biases are directly related to the activation of the amygdala, they can be considered a protective mechanism coded by the environments in which we interact daily (Cardiology, 2020; Sellaro et al., 2015).
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