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A differential neural response in the human amygdala to fearful and happy facial expressions

TLDR
Direct in vivo evidence of a differential neural response in the human amygdala to facial expressions of fear and happiness is reported, providing direct evidence that the humangdala is engaged in processing the emotional salience of faces, with a specificity of response to fearful facial expressions.
Abstract
The amygdala is thought to play a crucial role in emotional and social behaviour. Animal studies implicate the amygdala in both fear conditioning and face perception. In humans, lesions of the amygdala can lead to selective deficits in the recognition of fearful facial expressions and impaired fear conditioning, and direct electrical stimulation evokes fearful emotional responses. Here we report direct in vivo evidence of a differential neural response in the human amygdala to facial expressions of fear and happiness. Positron-emission tomography (PET) measures of neural activity were acquired while subjects viewed photographs of fearful or happy faces, varying systematically in emotional intensity. The neuronal response in the left amygdala was significantly greater to fearful as opposed to happy expressions. Furthermore, this response showed a significant interaction with the intensity of emotion (increasing with increasing fearfulness, decreasing with increasing happiness). The findings provide direct evidence that the human amygdala is engaged in processing the emotional salience of faces, with a specificity of response to fearful facial expressions.

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Functional neuroanatomy of CCK-4-induced panic attacks in healthy volunteers.

TL;DR: Overall brain activation patterns are not related to the subjective anxiety response to CCK‐4, but amygdala activation may be involved in the subjective perception of CCK•4‐induced fear.
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The Human Face of Game Theory: Trust and Reciprocity in Sequential Games

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BDNF, relative preference, and reward circuitry responses to emotional communication

TL;DR: It is shown that functional allelic variation in BDNF modulates human brain circuits processing reward/aversion information and relative preference transactions and that this variation affects human judgment and decision‐making regarding relative preference.
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Increased amygdala activation to emotional auditory stimuli in the blind.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging in sighted and connatally blind volunteers to investigate amygdala involvement in auditory emotional processing, and found that the blind showed robust selective activation in the amygdala to fearful and angry compared to neutral voices but also showed stronger activation to those stimuli than sighted participants.
Journal ArticleDOI

Psychophysiological Assessment of Prejudice: Past Research, Current Status, and Future Directions

TL;DR: Several psychophysiological approaches have been found valuable for assessing the valence and intensity of emotional responses and the availability of these tools make prejudice research ready for a return to psychophysiology methodologies.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Statistical parametric maps in functional imaging: A general linear approach

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a general approach that accommodates most forms of experimental layout and ensuing analysis (designed experiments with fixed effects for factors, covariates and interaction of factors).
Book

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

TL;DR: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Introduction to the First Edition and Discussion Index, by Phillip Prodger and Paul Ekman.

Pictures of Facial Affect

Paul Ekman
Journal ArticleDOI

Spatial registration and normalization of images

TL;DR: A general technique that facilitates nonlinear spatial (stereotactic) normalization and image realignment is presented that minimizes the sum of squares between two images following non linear spatial deformations and transformations of the voxel (intensity) values.
Journal ArticleDOI

Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala.

TL;DR: Findings suggest the human amygdala may be indispensable to recognize fear in facial expressions, but is not required to recognize personal identity from faces, and constrains the broad notion that the amygdala is involved in emotion.
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