Abigail Marsh

“Yet another problem with the ‘threat response’ theory is that it has difficulty explaining why damage to the amygdala impairs not just people’s ability to respond appropriately to fearful expressions but their ability to even identify them – to come up with a name for what the expresser is feeling. When S.M. sees a fearful face, it isn’t as though she knows what to call it but fails to show appropriate signs of fearful avoidance or vigilance in response. It’s that she sees it and is mystified by its very meaning, like a colour-blind person searching for a number in a featureless array of brown dots.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

“The coordinated volley of firing in the amygdala in response to danger is central to the felt experience of fear, as we know from studying patients like S.M. who lack both an amygdala and the ability to experience fear and from studying psychopaths in whom both the amygdala and the experience of fear are stunted. So yes, it’s certainly possible that amygdala responses to fearful expressions represent a learned response that these expressions signal the presence of danger. But there are also problems with this explanation.”
― Abigail Marsh, Good for Nothing: From Altruists to Psychopaths and Everyone in Between