BCN NeuroImaging Center, University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2007 Jun;2(2):93-103. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsm002.
The amygdala has been considered to be essential for recognizing fear in other people's facial expressions. Recent studies shed doubt on this interpretation. Here we used movies of facial expressions instead of static photographs to investigate the putative fear selectivity of the amygdala using fMRI under more ecological conditions. The amygdala was found to respond more to movies of facial expressions than to pattern motion, but no differences were found between the responses to neutral, happy, disgusted and fearful facial expressions. This lack of emotional selectivity was replicated in three experiments using three different tasks (passive observation, delayed match to sample and viewing for imitation) and two different analysis methods (voxel-by-voxel and anatomical region of interest). Our data therefore provide strong support for the idea that under more ecologically valid conditions, the contribution of the amygdala towards the detection of fearful facial expressions must be more indirect than previously assumed.
杏仁核被认为对于识别他人面部表情中的恐惧至关重要。然而,最近的研究对此提出了质疑。在这里,我们使用面部表情电影而不是静态照片,在更具生态性的条件下,使用 fMRI 研究杏仁核的假定恐惧选择性。研究发现,杏仁核对面部表情电影的反应比对模式运动的反应更强烈,但在对中性、快乐、厌恶和恐惧面部表情的反应中没有发现差异。在三个使用三种不同任务(被动观察、延迟匹配样本和观看模仿)和两种不同分析方法(体素和解剖学感兴趣区域)的实验中,重复了这种缺乏情绪选择性的结果。因此,我们的数据强烈支持这样一种观点,即在更具生态有效性的条件下,杏仁核对恐惧面部表情的检测的贡献必须比以前假设的更间接。