Part of the limbic system found within the medial temporal lobe, the amygdala influences the internal states of the body based on raidly processed input from the outside world.

The amygdala (Latin for “almond”) is a nucleus of the basal telencephalon important for regulating emotional states and memory. The amygdala is situated in the pole of the temporal lobe, just below the cortex on the medial side. Its name is derived from the Greek word for “almond,” because of its shape. The amygdala is a complex of nuclei that are commonly divided into three groups: the basolateral nuclei, the corticomedial nuclei, and the central nucleus.

The amygdala is a group of nuclei located within the anterior medial portion of the brain’s temporal lobe. Part of the limbic system, the amygdala is involved in processing of emotions, particularly fear, although its constituent nuclei – the basolateral nucleus, the central nucleus, the lateral nucleus – have diverse functions.

The amygdala, from the Greek word for almond, controls autonomic responses associated with fear, arousal, and emotional stimulation and has been linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, such as anxiety disorder and social phobias.

Amygdala is the integrative center for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure in the brain. As with most other brain structures, you actually have two amygdalae (shown in red in the drawing here). Each amygdala is located close to the hippocampus, in the frontal portion of the temporal lobe. Your amygdalae are essential to your ability to feel certain emotions and to perceive them in other people. This includes fear and the many changes that it causes in the body. In fact, the amygdala seems to modulate all of our reactions to events that are very important for our survival. Events that warn us of imminent danger are therefore very important stimuli for the amygdala, but so are events that signal the presence of food, sexual partners, rivals, children in distress, and so on.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure located within the anterior portion of the temporal lobes, comprising a component of the limbic system and known to play a part in controlling emotion, motivation, and memory.

The human amygdala is a high-order limbic brain region almost exclusively of telencephalic origin, which is located in the mesiotemporal region and extends into the basal forebrain. It is a nuclear complex composed of cell groups sharing similarities with neurons in the cerebral cortex, striatum, pallidum, anterior peduncular region, and preoptic area. Nuclei in the amygdaloid body and extended amygdala are tightly connected with each other, but each amygdaloid nucleus contributes in a very specific way to well-defined neuronal circuits to ensure proper adaptation to the environment.

Amygdala is a relatively small nucleus that lies deep inside the anterio-inferior region of the medial temporal lobe. Amygdala could be considered as an interface between sensory world and emotions.

The amygdala is a group of nuclei and cortex-like structures located in the rostromedial portion of the temporal lobe of the brain. As a group, amygdala nuclei receive sensory information of all modalities and project to all levels of the central nervous system, from the prefrontal cortex down to brain stem nuclei involved in cardiovascular control. The amygdala has become the focus of intense scrutiny in recent years, to a large extent because it participates in emotional expression and in the formation of emotional memories. Indeed, the amygdala plays a critical role in the acquisition of classically conditioned responses, both aversive and appetitive. Moreover, the amygdala mediates the facilitation of memory by emotions.

The amygdala (the term is derived from a Greek word meaning almond) comprises a group of nuclei located in the inner frontal part of the temporal lobes just anterior to the hippocampal formation (see Figure 1). Arguably, no other region of the brain is as crucial for human emotional behavior, and although the function of the amygdala defies a simple definition, it is clearly involved in assessing, learning, and responding to emotionally significant events. Put another way, the amygdala determines whether something is safe, pleasurable, desirable, or threatening, and determines the appropriate response. For this reason, the amygdala has been dubbed “the heart and soul of the brain’s emotional network” by Joseph LeDoux.

One of two parts of the brain that affect how people feel emotions, especially fear and pleasure.

The one of the four basal ganglia in each cerebral hemisphere that is part of the limbic system and consists of an almond-shaped mass of gray matter in the anterior extremity of the temporal lobe.

A roughly almond-shaped mass of grey matter inside each cerebral hemisphere, involved with the experiencing of emotions.

A structure in the forebrain that is an important component of the limbic system and plays a central role in emotional learning.

The amygdala is an important structure located in the anterior temporal lobe within the uncus. The amygdala makes reciprocal connections with many brain regions (figure 32) including the thalamus, hypothalamus, septal nuclei, orbital frontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and brain stem. The olfactory bulb is the only area that makes input to the amygdala and does not receive reciprocal projections from the amygdala. The amygdala is a critical center for coordinating behavioral, autonomic and endocrine responses to environmental stimuli, especially those with emotional content. It is important to the coordinated responses to stress and integrates many behavioral reactions involved in the survival of the individual or of the species, particularly to stress and anxiety. Lesions of the amygdala reduce responses to stress, particularly conditioned emotional responses. Stimulation of the amygdala produces behavioral arousal and can produce directed rage reactions. Various stimuli produce responses mediated by the amygdala. The convergence of inputs is important since it allows the generation of learned emotional responses to a variety of situations. The amygdala responds to a variety of emotional stimuli, but mostly those related to fear and anxiety.

In this view, the amygdala, originally designed to automatically detect potentially threatening or dangerous environmental events under ancestral conditions, has enlarged its domain of specificity in humans to respond to a broader range of self-relevant information in the physical and social environment, including intrinsic biological features and extrinsic context-dependant information.

The amygdala is a complex structure involved in a wide range of normal behavioral functions and psychiatric conditions. Like most brain regions, the amygdala is not a single mass but is composed of distinct subareas or nuclei. The almond shaped area that gives the amygdala its name was really only one of these nuclei, the basal nucleus, rather than the whole structure. More recently, however, it has been argued that the amygdala is neither a structural nor a functional unit, and instead consists of regions that belong to other regions or systems of the brain. In addition to its role in emotion, the amygdala is also involved in the regulation or modulation of a variety of cognitive functions, such as attention, perception and explicit memory.

The amygdala is one of the best known structures in animal and human affective neuroscience and features prominently in most brain-referenced theories of emotion.