A neuromodulatory role for the human amygdala in processing emotional facial expressions

Morris, John; Friston, Karl J.; Büchel, Christian; Frith, C. D.; Young, Andrew W.; Calder, Andy; Dolan, Raymond J.

doi:10.1093/brain/121.1.47

Cited by 1,143 publications

(838 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…cingulate, amygdala) associated with attention and/or motivation, indexing adaptive signi®cance (Lang et al, 1998). A direct test of this hypothesis con®rmed a modulatory role of the amygdala for brain activity in the extrastriate cortex (Morris et al, 1998). Similar reentrant processing linked to affect-related personality features might have been active in the present paradigm.…”

Section: Functional Signi®cance Of the Personality-modulated Microstatesmentioning

confidence: 54%

“…PET and fMRI studies using visual stimuli demonstrated activation of primary and secondary visual areas during emotional processing (Lane et al, 1997;Lang et al, 1998;Morris et al, 1998;Nakamura et al, 1998). This was accounted for by reentrant processes from more anterior structures (e.g.…”

Section: Functional Signi®cance Of the Personality-modulated Microstatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Face-elicited ERPs and affective attitude: brain electric microstate and tomography analyses

Pizzagalli

Lehmann

Koenig³

et al. 2000

Clinical Neurophysiology

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Section: Functional Signi®cance Of the Personality-modulated Microstatesmentioning

confidence: 54%

Section: Functional Signi®cance Of the Personality-modulated Microstatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Face-elicited ERPs and affective attitude: brain electric microstate and tomography analyses

Pizzagalli

Lehmann

Koenig³

et al. 2000

Clinical Neurophysiology

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“…However, there is some debate on how such rapid perception is accomplished. A fast subcortical thalamus‐amygdala route bypassing the visual cortex is thought to transmit coarse face‐related information (LeDoux, 2009; Morris et al, 1998), but its role in face perception is controversial (Krolak‐Salmon et al, 2004; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2011), including whether it is fear‐specific (Méndez‐Bértolo et al, 2016) or non‐specific to expression (Garvert, Friston, Dolan, & Garrido, 2014; McFadyen et al, 2017). On the other hand, multiple fast cortical pathways forming part of a feedforward and feedback mechanism consistute an equally plausible mechanism for rapid expression perception (Liu & Ioannides, 2010; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatiotemporal dynamics in human visual cortex rapidly encode the emotional content of faces

Dima

Perry

Messaritaki

et al. 2018

Human Brain Mapping

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Recognizing emotion in faces is important in human interaction and survival, yet existing studies do not paint a consistent picture of the neural representation supporting this task. To address this, we collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) data while participants passively viewed happy, angry and neutral faces. Using time‐resolved decoding of sensor‐level data, we show that responses to angry faces can be discriminated from happy and neutral faces as early as 90 ms after stimulus onset and only 10 ms later than faces can be discriminated from scrambled stimuli, even in the absence of differences in evoked responses. Time‐resolved relevance patterns in source space track expression‐related information from the visual cortex (100 ms) to higher‐level temporal and frontal areas (200–500 ms). Together, our results point to a system optimised for rapid processing of emotional faces and preferentially tuned to threat, consistent with the important evolutionary role that such a system must have played in the development of human social interactions.

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“…Both lesion and functional-imaging studies in humans have demonstrated the amygdala's role in the visual recognition of emotional facial expressions (1)(2)(3). Studies in humans further indicate the amygdala's participation in assessing the significance of paralinguistic emotional stimuli (1,4).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Linguistic threat activates the human amygdala

Isenberg

Silbersweig²,

Engelien³

et al. 1999

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

316

206

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Studies in animals demonstrate a crucial role for the amygdala in emotional and social behavior, especially as related to fear and aggression. Whereas lesion and functional-imaging studies in humans indicate the amygdala's participation in assessing the significance of nonverbal as well as paralinguistic cues, direct evidence for its role in the emotional processing of linguistic cues is lacking. In this study, we use a modified Stroop task along with a highsensitivity neuroimaging technique to target the neural substrate engaged specifically when processing linguistic threat. Healthy volunteer subjects were instructed to name the color of words of either threat or neutral valence, presented in different color fonts, while neural activity was measured by using H 2 15 O positron-emission tomography. Bilateral amygdalar activation was significantly greater during color naming of threat words than during color naming of neutral words. Associated activations were also noted in sensory-evaluative and motor-planning areas of the brain. Thus, our results demonstrate the amygdala's role in the processing of danger elicited by language. In addition, the results reinforce the amygdala's role in the modulation of the perception of, and response to, emotionally salient stimuli. The current study further suggests conservation of phylogenetically older mechanisms of emotional evaluation in the context of more recently evolved linguistic function.Both lesion and functional-imaging studies in humans have demonstrated the amygdala's role in the visual recognition of emotional facial expressions (1-3). Studies in humans further indicate the amygdala's participation in assessing the significance of paralinguistic emotional stimuli (1, 4). In humans, emotional cues are also transmitted linguistically. Evidence for the amygdala's function in the emotional processing of linguistic cues, however, has yet to be described. In this experiment, we sought to test the hypothesis that the human amygdala is involved in the emotional processing of linguistic cues specifically related to threat.

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A neuromodulatory role for the human amygdala in processing emotional facial expressions

Cited by 1,143 publications

References 67 publications

Face-elicited ERPs and affective attitude: brain electric microstate and tomography analyses

Face-elicited ERPs and affective attitude: brain electric microstate and tomography analyses

Spatiotemporal dynamics in human visual cortex rapidly encode the emotional content of faces

Linguistic threat activates the human amygdala

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