Awareness modulates responses of the amygdala and the visual cortex to highly arousing visual threat

Hoffmann, Marius; Lipka, Judith; Mothes-Lasch, Martin; Miltner, Wolfgang H. R.; Straube, Thomas

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.05.064

Cited by 20 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 42 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We did not find any difference between these conditions. This result is consistent with the idea that the structures that give rise to the emotional modulation of the pupil may be automatic and beyond conscious control, a claim that has been made for some brain structures that may mediate the emotional modulation of pupil responses (e.g., Whalen et al, ), though this is disputed by others (Hoffmann et al, ). We stress, however, that we did not attempt a very stringent test of whether attention could ever modulate the effect of emotion on the pupil's response.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Future experiments might seek to limit the duration of processing by introducing a “backward masking” procedure (where the target stimulus is immediately followed by a pattern mask that stops further visual processing of the target). It would also be of great interest to extend this experiment to even briefer intervals where the detection of the emotional content of the stimulus no longer produces a conscious or reportable sensation (so‐called subliminal presentations: see Nuske et al, ) given the claims that areas such as the amygdala not only can respond to subliminal stimuli, but may even give greater responses than to supraliminal stimuli (Williams et al, )—though also see Hoffmann, Lipka, Mothes‐Lasch, Miltner, and Straube (). We should also note that we only analyzed the pupil response for a limited window of time shortly after stimulus onset (1,000–2,000 ms).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The pupil's response to affective pictures: Role of image duration, habituation, and viewing mode

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The pupil has been shown to be sensitive to the emotional content of stimuli. We examined this phenomenon by comparing fearful and neutral images carefully matched in the domains of luminance, image contrast, image color, and complexity of content. The pupil was more dilated after viewing affective pictures, and this effect was (a) shown to be independent of the presentation time of the images (from 100–3,000 ms), (b) not diminished by repeated presentations of the images, and (c) not affected by actively naming the emotion of the stimuli in comparison to passive viewing. Our results show that the emotional modulation of the pupil is present over a range of variables that typically vary from study to study (image duration, number of trials, free viewing vs. task), and encourages the use of pupillometry as a measure of emotional processing in populations where alternative techniques may not be appropriate.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The pupil's response to affective pictures: Role of image duration, habituation, and viewing mode

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although caregiving responses may be weaker when the child is not in distress (i.e., crying) or when the threat is aimed at the adult, the hypothesis that neural differences can be observed if the subliminal threat is really processed may still be warranted. Interestingly, results of some recent studies actually do not provide much support for the existence of a human brain system capable of preconscious processing of threatening information (see Pessoa and Adolphs, 2010 ; Hoffmann et al, 2012 ). It should be noted that in earlier studies of “subliminal” processing of affective information primes were often presented for 30 ms or longer (Morris et al, 1998 ; Whalen et al, 1998 ; Dimberg et al, 2000 ; Li et al, 2008 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…However, in some studies no evidence for the existence of such an automatic processing system of threat-related stimuli was found. For example, in earlier studies with threat-related stimuli presented in supraliminal and subliminal conditions, enhanced amygdala activity was found in the supraliminal, but not in the subliminal condition (Pessoa et al, 2006 ; Hoffmann et al, 2012 ). Importantly, not everyone may respond to emotional or threatening information in the same way, and such moderating effects may explain inconsistent findings for main effects of threat-related stimuli.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Neural Processing of Familiar and Unfamiliar Children’s Faces: Effects of Experienced Love Withdrawal, but No Effects of Neutral and Threatening Priming

Heckendorf

Huffmeijer

Bakermans‐Kranenburg

et al. 2016

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the face of a potential threat to his or her child, a parent’s caregiving system becomes activated, motivating the parent to protect and care for the child. However, the neural correlates of these responses are not yet well understood. The current study was a pilot study to investigate the processing of subliminally presented threatening primes and their effects on neural responses to familiar and unfamiliar children’s faces. In addition, we studied potential moderating effects of empathy and childhood experiences of love-withdrawal. A total of 45 students participated in an fMRI experiment in which they were shown pictures of familiar children (pictures morphed to resemble the participant like an own child would) and unfamiliar children preceded by neutral and threatening primes. Participants completed a modified version of the Children’s Report of Parental Behavior Inventory to measure parental love withdrawal, and the Empathic Concern scale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to measure affective empathy. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find evidence for subliminal priming effects. However, we did find enhanced activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; involved in self-referential processing) and in face processing areas (infero-lateral occipital cortex and fusiform areas) in response to the familiar child, indicating preferential processing of these faces. Effects of familiarity in face processing areas were larger for participants reporting more love withdrawal, suggesting enhanced attention to and processing of these highly attachment relevant stimuli. Unfamiliar faces elicited enhanced activity in bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) and other regions associated with theory of mind (ToM), which may indicate more effortful ToM processing of these faces. We discuss the potential difference between a familiarity and a caregiving effect triggered by the morphed faces, and emphasize the need for replication in parents with pictures of their “real” own child.

show abstract

“…The existing literature on prediction and consciousness suggests that prior expectations decrease the overall neural amplitude (Summerfield et al, 2011) but increase the precision of a stimulus' neural representation in V1 (Kok et al, 2012;Kok et al, 2013), possibly facilitated by the pulvinar (Kanai et al, 2015) or other feedback sources to V1's deep cortical layers (Kok et al, 2016). Conscious access to emotional stimuli, on the other hand, appears to be modulated by the amplitude of neural signal in the amygdala and its connected cortical visual areas (Anderson and Phelps, 2001;Hoffmann et al, 2012). During conscious emotion perception, functional connectivity is increased between the amygdala and the extrastriate cortex, compared to between the brainstem, pulvinar, and amygdala during unconscious perception (Williams et al, 2006).…”

Section: Affective and Predictive Influences On Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shortcuts for fear in hierarchical visual systems

McFadyen¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is crucial to our survival that we can rapidly predict, detect, and respond to potential threats in our environment. As highly visual creatures, we have developed sophisticated neural networks for processing visual information about the world around us. Both the visual system and the amygdala are arguably the most thoroughly studied components of the brain and yet there is considerable controversy over how these two systems interact to rapidly respond to signs of threat. The work presented in this thesis aimed to resolve this controversy by investigating the structural and effective neural connectivity underlying rapid responses to fearful faces, with a particular focus on

show abstract

Awareness modulates responses of the amygdala and the visual cortex to highly arousing visual threat

Cited by 20 publications

References 42 publications

The pupil's response to affective pictures: Role of image duration, habituation, and viewing mode

The pupil's response to affective pictures: Role of image duration, habituation, and viewing mode

Neural Processing of Familiar and Unfamiliar Children’s Faces: Effects of Experienced Love Withdrawal, but No Effects of Neutral and Threatening Priming

Shortcuts for fear in hierarchical visual systems

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About