Wright Paul, Liu Yijun
Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida, 100 Newell Drive, PO Box 100256, Gainesville, 32610-0256, USA.
Neuroimage. 2006 Jan 15;29(2):628-36. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.07.047. Epub 2005 Sep 6.
Although the amygdala has been described as a "fear module", a growing body of work suggests that it is a more general "relevance detector." A well-established face matching task has been shown to robustly activate the amygdala and has been used to investigate the influence of age, drugs, and genetics on the amygdala. In order to examine more specifically the emotion processing component in this task, we added a condition in which neutral faces are matched by identity. The left and right amygdalae responded to both the emotion and the identity matching condition, and the only selective response to emotion matching was at the left inferior prefrontal sulcus. The left amygdalar response habituated to emotion matching but not to identity matching. We concluded that the amygdalar response to face matching is driven at least in part by relevance detection, independent of emotion processing, although there appears to be additional emotion-specific processing at the left amygdala.
尽管杏仁核被描述为一个“恐惧模块”，但越来越多的研究表明它是一个更通用的“相关性探测器”。一项成熟的面部匹配任务已被证明能强烈激活杏仁核，并已被用于研究年龄、药物和基因对杏仁核的影响。为了更具体地研究该任务中的情绪处理成分，我们增加了一个中性面孔按身份匹配的条件。左右杏仁核对情绪和身份匹配条件均有反应，而对情绪匹配的唯一选择性反应出现在左前额叶下沟。左侧杏仁核的反应对情绪匹配产生了习惯化，但对身份匹配没有。我们得出结论，杏仁核对面部匹配的反应至少部分是由相关性检测驱动的，与情绪处理无关，尽管左侧杏仁核似乎存在额外的特定于情绪的处理。
