Perceived Threats
Posted on 01/20/10
As an investigator with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, I was always on my guard. Walking into an unknown situation, I had only a few seconds to determine whether I was in any danger. My extensive training was indispensable, but it’s within everyone’s capability to make simple, split-second threat assessments based on body language.
A study published in the 2010 Neuroimage by Sinke, Sorger, Goebel, and de Gelder details how our brain processes viewing different situations. The authors showed participants different short video clips of a male actor stealing a purse from a female actor in either a “threatening” or “teasing” manner. The authors tasked some of the participants with determining the safety of the situation, but asked others to pay attention to a series of colored dots that periodically popped up on the screen. They used “functional MRI” (fMRI) to measure blood flow to different regions of the brain during the exercise.
The authors found that, no matter which tasks the participants performed, the amygdala response was greater in the “threatening” condition. The amygdala is the region of the brain associated with emotional learning. These findings indicate that, while our eyes are focused on other things, our brains are still trained on perceived threats.
