Astrid Veronika Rauch

TL;DR: Automatic brain reactivity to facial emotion was investigated as a function of alexithymia and a reduced automatic reactivity of the amygdala and visual occipito-temporal areas could implicate less automated engagement in the encoding of emotional stimuli in high alexithsymia individuals.

TL;DR: Dysfunctional amygdala responsiveness during emotion processing has been implicated in both bipolar disorder and Major depressive disorder but the important rapid and automatic stages of emotion processing in the amygdala have so far never been investigated in bipolar patients.

TL;DR: The results indicate that reduced amygdala responsiveness to positive stimuli may contribute to anhedonic symptoms due to reduced/inappropriate salience attribution to positive information at very early processing levels.

TL;DR: Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine differences in automatic brain reactivity to facial emotions as a function of attachment avoidance in a sample of 51 healthy adults, finding that people who withdraw from close relationships respond spontaneously to a lesser extent to negative interpersonal emotional signals than securely attached individuals.

TL;DR: These findings suggest a possible neuroprotective role of the G-allele of the SNP rs1800795 on hippocampal volumes and studies on the role of this SNP in psychiatric populations and especially in those with an affected hippocampus are warranted.