Just as positive reinforcements is conditioning…

In the more classical sense?

So too are negative reinforcements:

[via Medical Xpress] In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces.

Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be ‘hyper-aware’ of danger in their environment.

However, the anterior insula and amygdala are also areas of the brain implicated in anxiety disorders. Neural adaptation in these regions may help explain why children exposed to family violence are at greater risk of developing anxiety problems later in life. [Read More]

Negative reinforcements which do NOT only have an impact on the brain by increasing brain activity in certain regions…

But such negative reinforcements also triggers dis-inhibition through “emotional” associative fear learning.

[via Medical Xpress] A team of neurobiologists around Andreas Lüthi at the Friedrich Miescher Institute of Biomedical Research has shown for the first time that cortex, the largest area of the brain that is typically associated with higher functions such as perception and cognition, is also a prominent site of emotional learning. Letzkus and colleagues used a set of recently developed methods to observe through which neuronal circuits activity is conveyed during learning. This study, published in Nature, demonstrates a causal link between neuronal activity patterns and animal behavior, and provides pioneering work exploring emotions in the brain.

Anxiety disorders are a family of complex diseases, which affect around 10% of adults. One of the hallmarks of these disorders is that patients have “learned” to fear situations or objects to a degree that is not proportional to the real danger. The amygdala, a structure deep in the brain, is central to the processing of fear and anxiety, and its function may be disrupted in anxiety disorders.  But, there is no fear without a sensory input: We hear, see, smell, taste or feel something that then triggers fear. These sensory signals are processed in the cortex, the region of the brain typically associated with higher functions such as perception and cognition. However, how this brain region is involved in emotional learning has hardly ever been addressed.

For the first time, scientists in the team of Andreas Lüthi, group leader at the FMI and professor at the University of Basel, have been able to follow a sensory stimulus during learning on its cellular path through the brain. Their results, describing a circuit in cortex critical for associative fear learning, have been published today in the distinguished scientific journal Nature.

Lüthi then went on to show that this dis-inhibitory microcircuit is also present in other areas of cortex, like the one processing visual input. “A really interesting aspect of our observations is that dis-inhibition appears to be necessary for learning, but does not cause learning on its own. Rather, what we perceive during a state of heightened arousal will determine what we actually learn” explains Lüthi. [Read More]

All of this amazing, fantastic science?

Helps me to safely draw one very obvious conclusion….

This kid?

[Source]

Gonna have all sorts of issues with magic tricks when he grows up.