Hooker Christine I, Germine Laura T, Knight Robert T, D'Esposito Mark
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-3190, USA.
J Neurosci. 2006 Aug 30;26(35):8915-22. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3048-05.2006.
The functional role of the human amygdala in the evaluation of emotional facial expressions is unclear. Previous animal and human research shows that the amygdala participates in processing positive and negative reinforcement as well as in learning predictive associations between stimuli and subsequent reinforcement. Thus, amygdala response to facial expressions could reflect the processing of primary reinforcement or emotional learning. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested the hypothesis that amygdala response to facial expressions is driven by emotional association learning. We show that the amygdala is more responsive to learning object-emotion associations from happy and fearful facial expressions than it is to the presentation of happy and fearful facial expressions alone. The results provide evidence that the amygdala uses social signals to rapidly and flexibly learn threatening and rewarding associations that ultimately serve to enhance survival.
人类杏仁核在评估情绪化面部表情时所起的功能作用尚不清楚。先前的动物和人类研究表明，杏仁核参与处理正向和负向强化，以及学习刺激与后续强化之间的预测性关联。因此，杏仁核对面部表情的反应可能反映了初级强化或情绪学习的过程。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像技术，检验了杏仁核对面部表情的反应是由情绪关联学习驱动这一假设。我们发现，与单纯呈现开心和恐惧的面部表情相比，杏仁核对从开心和恐惧的面部表情中学习物体-情绪关联的反应更强。这些结果提供了证据，表明杏仁核利用社交信号快速且灵活地学习威胁性和奖励性关联，这些关联最终有助于提高生存率。
