Limbic System Research Paper

The limbic system (or Paleomammalian brain) is a set of brain structures including the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, and limbic cortex, which support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior, long term memory, and olfaction.[1] The term "limbic" comes from Latin limbus, loosely translating as "border" or "belt".

In another study, Langlois and Roggaman (1990) took photos of faces and morphed them together to produce composite images made up of 4, 8, 16 or 32 images. Participants rated faces as increasingly attractive the more faces that went into each image; this applied to both male and female faces. The more faces in an image, the more symmetrical they become, it seems that moving a facial image closer to the average increases its perceived attractiveness. It is likely that symmetry equates to fitness and “good genes”, these people are less likely to have been affected by harmful mutation. People with attractive faces are preferred because of the benefits of passing on these attractive characteristics to offspring. Little & Hancock propose that humans have evolved to be attracted to symmetrical faces because they indicate “averageness”, which equates to genetic health. Grammar and Thornhill (1994) found that females are attracted to males with masculine characteristics, for example: large jaw and prominent cheekbones. These features arise as a result of testosterone, which is also a handicap because it suppresses the immune system. Therefore, showing only “healthy” individuals can afford to produce these traits- advertising a strong immune system. Cartwright (2000) supported this, finding men prefer photographs of women with symmetrical faces and vice versa.

There are several different types of psychological and neurological phenomena that individuals live with every day. One of most interesting conditions that many individuals might not be aware of is prosopagnosia or face blindness. Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize and distinguish faces. For example, individuals with this condition could have difficulty recognizing their child’s, spouse’s, parent’s, or friend’s face. Many individuals with prosopagnosia will rely on other features to distinguish between other people, such as hair style or color, voices, or posture. As discussed in Chapter 3, prosopagnosia is thought to affect the Fusiform Face Area.

Processing faces is extremely important to humans as social beings. We are able to put and identity on thousands of faces (Gazzaniga, 2002) with ease, something we might take for granted. The value of this ability can be better understood when the world is viewed through the eyes of somebody with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces. The following quotation from David Fine, a prosopagnosic describing the difficulty associated with the disorder.

B efore marriage, love or even dating, there is attraction, the unexpected force that draws two people together. Physical attractiveness is the physical traits which are perceived and believed to be aesthetically pleasing or beautiful. There are multiple factors which influence one person to be attracted to another. These factors can vary between many cultures, cultural and social aspects, and individual subjective preferences (Gangestad & Scyheyd, 2005). An individuals perceived attractiveness can have a significant effect on how they are judged in terms of employment or social opportunities, friendship, sexual behavior, and marriage (Townsend & Levy, 1990).

It has been shown that the human amygdala is necessary for recognising emotion, and damage in this area can cause an individual to experience lack of facial recognition and the inability to understand emotions such as fear. Although this is true, damage to the amygdala does not appear to cause difficulty in recognising facial identity (Adolphs et al, 1994). This essay will discuss the importance of the human amygdala, and what an individual can experience if this part of the brain is damaged.

Even compensatory strategies, such as recognising an individual by their hairstyle or gait, may be rendered ineffective, if a known individual appears in a new context or has changed some aspect of their appearance. Despite prosopagnosia being of an obvious disadvantage to the sufferer, it does allow for the investigation of components involved in normal face processing. By comparing the retained perceptual functions in a prosopagnosiac to those of an individual with ordinary face processing, it can be theorised which mechanisms work independently within face processing. Therefore, this essay will comment on three key distinctions which have been made about normal face processing, based on the research into prosopagnosia: the distinction between the systems involved in face and object processing; the distinction between the emotional response and conscious response of recognising faces; the distinction between the areas involved in recognising facial identity and facial

It reinforces our understanding of how we mentally judge/assess people using "snap" and "systematic" judgements. The article shows that goodlooking people are attracted to other goodlooking people most likely because they subconsiously trust them and feel like they are virtuous people based on their looks because of the social stereotype and perceiver expectation that reinforce that thinking. On the other hand, the article and the experiments reinforce our understanding that when two people are friends for a relatively long time, they move onto "systematic" judgements that allow them to make more in-depth and more accurate evaluation of each other. They do so by observing the behaviour and understanding the motives, thoughts and feelings of

In the no image condition participants encoded faces and names as separate units. For the image condition subjects formed visual image associations

Overly, the model provides coherent explanation of many kind of information about faces and how they relate to each other. It provides evidence about significant differences in processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Nonetheless there are limitations. For instance, there is not enough information about processing unfamiliar faces. Burton et al. (1999)

Kiiski et al. (2016) attempted to research this inquiry using the merits of a laboratory experiment. Their observations reaffirmed the conclusion that adults have a general aesthetic preference for youthful faces, however, they also built upon this genre of research by investigating the role that the age of a face plays on both the perceptual qualities and the social attributes that one perceives. They included measured factors like the perceived trustworthiness and familiarity, along with a general evaluation of aesthetic preference. The design of the experiment consisted of a sample of 162 individuals — 94 of whom were aged between 18-33 years, while the remaining 68 were aged between 57-87 years. The experiment itself consisted of subjects sitting in front of a computer screen and rating various faces, aged between 16-88 years, on a scale of one to seven — based on the criterion of attractiveness, competence, trustworthiness, dominance, familiarity and distinctiveness. The images themselves were only projected on the monitor for a few seconds to ensure that the opinions formed were instantaneous and subliminal. The results of the research displayed a clear preference for youthful faces across every age group. Perceived attractiveness, as well as trustworthiness all increased as age

The limbic system links together a bunch of brain structures that control our emotional responses, such as feeling

One of the most accepted theories on face processing involves holistic face perception in which faces are recognized as a conceptual whole, by integration of spatial relations among facial components and featural information into one representation.

Bruce and Young’s theory of recognition tells us that human’s extract several kinds of information from faces; and that there are eight different components of such information. Such as structural encoding, expression analysis, facial speech analysis, directed visual processing, face recognition nodes,

What is beauty? How do we decide who is attractive and who is not? Society is full of information telling us what is beautiful, but what fact is that information based on? The topic of beauty has been studied, analyzed and controversial for centuries. We all know the feeling you can have when you hear a beautiful song that brings joy to your heart, stand in a field of flowers that excites your eyes, or admire a face that is visually pleasing. As human beings, we are all drawn to beauty, but what is it that makes something beautiful? The controversial issue that surrounds beauty is that some believe that true beauty is defined by someone’s outer appearance, while others believe it is something that is experienced through a person’s