Norris Catherine J, Chen E Elinor, Zhu David C, Small Steven L, Cacioppo John T
Institute of Mind and Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2004 Dec;16(10):1818-29. doi: 10.1162/0898929042947847.
Social stimuli function as emotional barometers for the immediate environment are the catalysts for many emotional reactions, and have inherent value for relationships and survival independent of their current emotional content. We, therefore, propose that the neural mechanisms underlying social and emotional information processing may be interconnected. In the current study, we examined the independent and interactive effects of social and emotional processes on brain activation. Whole-brain images were acquired while participants viewed and categorized affective pictures that varied on two dimensions: emotional content (i. e., neutral, emotional) and social content (i. e., faces/people, objects/scenes). Patterns of activation were consistent with past findings demonstrating that the amygdala and part of the visual cortex were more active to emotionally evocative pictures than to neutral pictures and that the superior temporal sulcus was more active to social than to nonsocial pictures. Furthermore, activation of the superior temporal sulcus and middle occipito-temporal cortex showed evidence of the interactive processing of emotional and social information, whereas activation of the amygdala showed evidence of additive effects. These results indicate that interactive effects occur early in the stream of processing, suggesting that social and emotional information garner greater attentional resources and that the conjunction of social and emotional cues results in synergistic early processing, whereas the amygdala appears to be primarily implicated in processing biologically or personally relevant stimuli, regardless of the nature of the relevance (i. e., social, emotional, or both).
社会刺激作为即时环境的情感晴雨表，是许多情感反应的催化剂，并且对于人际关系和生存具有内在价值，而与它们当前的情感内容无关。因此，我们提出，社会和情感信息处理背后的神经机制可能是相互关联的。在当前的研究中，我们考察了社会和情感过程对大脑激活的独立和交互作用。在参与者观看并对在两个维度上变化的情感图片进行分类时，采集了全脑图像：情感内容（即中性、情感性）和社会内容（即面孔/人物、物体/场景）。激活模式与过去的研究结果一致，表明杏仁核和部分视觉皮层对情感唤起图片的反应比对中性图片更活跃，并且颞上沟对社会图片的反应比对非社会图片更活跃。此外，颞上沟和枕颞中皮层的激活显示出情感和社会信息交互处理的证据，而杏仁核的激活显示出累加效应的证据。这些结果表明，交互作用在处理流程的早期就会出现，这表明社会和情感信息会获得更多的注意力资源，并且社会和情感线索的结合会导致早期的协同处理，而杏仁核似乎主要参与处理生物学或个人相关的刺激，无论相关性的性质如何（即社会的、情感的或两者皆有）。
