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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

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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Journal ArticleDOI

Spared ability to recognise fear from static and moving whole-body cues following bilateral amygdala damage.

TL;DR: It is reported that whatever the role of the amygdala in processing whole-body fear cues, it is apparently not necessary for the normal recognition of fear from either static or dynamic body expressions.
Journal ArticleDOI

Perception of socially relevant stimuli in schizophrenia.

TL;DR: The findings point towards circumscribed domains of impaired social cognition in schizophrenia and suggest specific further hypotheses about the neural dysfunction that may underlie them.
Journal ArticleDOI

Facial expression recognition in depressed subjects: the impact of intensity level and arousal dimension.

TL;DR: It is concluded that the inability to accurately recognize nonemotional and emotional facial expressions along with the tendency for more attributions to the high arousal emotions can represent 2 basic contributing factors to the well-documented social problems of patients with depression.
Book ChapterDOI

Mechanisms of control

TL;DR: Functional imaging studies that illustrate different approaches to the study of control mechanisms are mainly concerned with attempts to assign specific control functions to different regions of prefrontal cortex.
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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