# Amygdala and self-criticism About the interactions/relationships between the [[Amygdala]] and self-criticism. - Harsh self-criticism not only triggers strong negative emotional responses but also is a symptom of depression itself - Major depressive disorder is characterised by disturbances in emotional processing. In processing emotional stimuli, the amygdala functions by mediating attention, assigning an evaluation to the emotional stimulus and storing emotionally significant events in long-term memory. Additionally, the amygdala has numerous connections with other brain regions, such as the ventral striatum, which further process and integrate emotional information - Studies have reported depression-related hyperactivity in the amygdala as well as in the ventral striatum, probably causing negatively biased emotion processing - Studies have reported robust enhanced activation of striatal regions and the amygdala in people with acute depression as well as in patients with a history of depression confronted with critical comments about their own mothers - Passive processing of emotional visual stimuli is associated with a higher probability of amygdala activation than processing accompanied by active task instructions - The negative relationship between right amygdala activation and change in depressive symptoms during therapy might be explained by improvement of emotion regulation skills - High levels of amygdala activation by individualized self-critical stimuli at baseline may hamper patients’ readiness to learn new emotion regulation skills. In support of this hypothesis, a recent study demonstrated that adding emotion regulation training to CBT for depression given as an in-patient treatment improved treatment outcome - To counter this, search for individual strengths to build on when dealing with challenging emotions, such as memories of previously mastered challenges or interpersonal resources - A study has reported better outcomes in personalizing treatment to patients’ relative strengths than to their relative deficits - It is still unclear exactly how amygdala hyperactivity might impede the development of emotion regulation skills. One explanation might be that overly strong emotions are experienced as disturbing and overwhelming, and consequent avoidance of displeasing emotions might impede or even prevent emotional change