Department of Psychology, University of Greifswald, Franz-Mehring-Strasse 47, 17487 Greifswald, Germany.
Behav Brain Res. 2010 Jun 26;210(1):16-23. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2010.01.038. Epub 2010 Feb 1.
Brain regions associated with the processing of emotional stimuli are often also associated with the processing of social stimuli. Therefore, this network consisting of the amygdala, the anterior insula, the superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) may rather be involved in more general relevance detection which should be independent of the sensory modality of the stimuli. In the current study, we used functional MRI to measure brain activations while participants either viewed pictures that varied in their emotional and social content or listened to sounds that varied along the same dimensions. The amygdala, the anterior insula, the STS, and the OFC showed increased activation during processing of emotional as well as social stimuli independent of the sensory modality in which the stimuli were presented. Moreover, social emotional stimuli elicited more pronounced activity in this network than stimuli with solely emotional or social content. These results indicate that the proposed network involved in relevance detection works independently of the source of relevance (emotional or social information mediated by the stimulus) and modality.
与处理情绪刺激相关的大脑区域通常也与处理社会刺激相关。因此，这个由杏仁核、前岛叶、颞上沟（STS）和眶额皮层（OFC）组成的网络可能更多地参与了更普遍的相关性检测，而这种检测应该与刺激的感觉模态无关。在当前的研究中，我们使用功能磁共振成像来测量参与者观看情绪和社会内容不同的图片或听情绪和社会内容不同的声音时的大脑激活。杏仁核、前岛叶、STS 和 OFC 在处理情绪和社会刺激时表现出了与刺激呈现的感觉模态无关的增加的激活。此外，社会情绪刺激在这个网络中引起的活动比仅具有情绪或社会内容的刺激更明显。这些结果表明，参与相关性检测的提议网络独立于相关性的来源（由刺激介导的情绪或社会信息）和模态。
