Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA; Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.
Neuroimage. 2013 Dec;83:679-89. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.002. Epub 2013 Jul 10.
Effective navigation of the social world relies on the correct interpretation of facial emotions. This may be particularly important in formative years. Critically, literature examining the emergence of face processing in youth (children and adolescents) has focused on the neural and behavioral correlates of processing adult faces, which are relationally different from youth participants, and whose facial expressions may convey different meaning than faces of their peers. During a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, we compared concurrent neural and behavioral responses as youth (N=25) viewed validated, emotionally varied (i.e., anger, fear, happy, and neutral) adult and child face stimuli. We observed that participants made fewer errors when matching adult, compared to child, face stimuli, and that while similar brain regions were involved in processing both adult and child faces, activation in the face processing neural network was greater for adult than child faces. This was true across emotions, and also when comparing neutral adult versus neutral child faces. Additionally, a valence by stimuli-type effect was observed within the amygdala. That is, within adult face stimuli, negative and neutral face stimuli elicited the largest effects, whereas within child face stimuli, happy face stimuli elicited the largest amygdala effects. Thus, heightened engagement of the amygdala was observed for happy child and angry adult faces, which may reflect age-specific salience of select emotions in early life. This study provides evidence that the relational age of the perceived face influences neural processing in youth.
有效导航社会世界依赖于对面部情绪的正确解读。这在成长阶段可能尤为重要。重要的是，研究青少年（儿童和青少年）面部处理能力发展的文献集中于处理成人面孔的神经和行为相关性，这与青少年参与者的关系不同，并且其面部表情可能与同龄人传达的不同意义。在功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 扫描期间，我们比较了青年（N=25）观看经过验证的、情绪多样化（即愤怒、恐惧、快乐和中性）的成人和儿童面孔刺激物时的并发神经和行为反应。我们观察到，参与者在匹配成人面孔刺激物时比匹配儿童面孔刺激物时犯的错误更少，并且虽然处理成人和儿童面孔都涉及相同的大脑区域，但成人面孔的面部处理神经网络的激活比儿童面孔更强。这在所有情绪中都是如此，当比较中性成人面孔与中性儿童面孔时也是如此。此外，在杏仁核内观察到效价与刺激类型的效应。也就是说，在成人面孔刺激物中，负面和中性面孔刺激物引起的效果最大，而在儿童面孔刺激物中，快乐面孔刺激物引起的杏仁核效果最大。因此，观察到快乐儿童和愤怒成人面孔的杏仁核参与度增加，这可能反映了生命早期特定情绪的特定年龄的显著性。这项研究提供了证据，表明感知面孔的相对年龄会影响年轻人的神经处理。
