Processing of facial expressions and their significance for the observer in subregions of the human amygdala.
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Processing of facial expressions and their significance for the observer in subregions of the human amygdala. / Boll, Sabrina; Gamer, Matthias; Kalisch, Raffael; Büchel, Christian.
in: NEUROIMAGE, Jahrgang 56, Nr. 1, 1, 2011, S. 299-306.Publikationen: SCORING: Beitrag in Fachzeitschrift/Zeitung › SCORING: Zeitschriftenaufsatz › Forschung › Begutachtung
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Processing of facial expressions and their significance for the observer in subregions of the human amygdala.
AU - Boll, Sabrina
AU - Gamer, Matthias
AU - Kalisch, Raffael
AU - Büchel, Christian
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Amygdala responses to emotional faces can be influenced by concomitant gaze direction. As an explanation it has been suggested that the observer uses eye gaze as a cue to decipher the source of a potential threat in order to evaluate the significance of the situation. To test this assumption, we kept gaze direction ambiguous and replaced the information possibly provided by gaze direction with explicit, contextual information about intentions of angry and fearful faces. Using fMRI we show that this manipulation evokes a similar pattern of amygdala activation as prior gaze-related accounts: angry faces targeting at the observer elicited stronger amygdala responses than angry faces targeting at another person, whereas the opposite pattern was observed for fearful faces. We further combined our paradigm with high-resolution fMRI which enabled us to localize clusters of activation in amygdala subregions: purely facial-expression evoked signal changes were observed in the accessory basal nucleus, whereas our data suggest a critical role of the corticomedial amygdala in linking contextual information to emotional faces and in deciphering the significance of the faces for the observer.
AB - Amygdala responses to emotional faces can be influenced by concomitant gaze direction. As an explanation it has been suggested that the observer uses eye gaze as a cue to decipher the source of a potential threat in order to evaluate the significance of the situation. To test this assumption, we kept gaze direction ambiguous and replaced the information possibly provided by gaze direction with explicit, contextual information about intentions of angry and fearful faces. Using fMRI we show that this manipulation evokes a similar pattern of amygdala activation as prior gaze-related accounts: angry faces targeting at the observer elicited stronger amygdala responses than angry faces targeting at another person, whereas the opposite pattern was observed for fearful faces. We further combined our paradigm with high-resolution fMRI which enabled us to localize clusters of activation in amygdala subregions: purely facial-expression evoked signal changes were observed in the accessory basal nucleus, whereas our data suggest a critical role of the corticomedial amygdala in linking contextual information to emotional faces and in deciphering the significance of the faces for the observer.
KW - Adult
KW - Humans
KW - Male
KW - Young Adult
KW - Magnetic Resonance Imaging
KW - Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted
KW - Brain Mapping
KW - Facial Expression
KW - Amygdala/physiology
KW - Emotions/physiology
KW - Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology
KW - Adult
KW - Humans
KW - Male
KW - Young Adult
KW - Magnetic Resonance Imaging
KW - Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted
KW - Brain Mapping
KW - Facial Expression
KW - Amygdala/physiology
KW - Emotions/physiology
KW - Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology
M3 - SCORING: Journal article
VL - 56
SP - 299
EP - 306
JO - NEUROIMAGE
JF - NEUROIMAGE
SN - 1053-8119
IS - 1
M1 - 1
ER -
