Dataset Information

Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion.

ABSTRACT: The human amygdala plays a key role in recognizing facial emotions and neurons in the monkey and human amygdala respond to the emotional expression of faces. However, it remains unknown whether these responses are driven primarily by properties of the stimulus or by the perceptual judgments of the perceiver. We investigated these questions by recording from over 200 single neurons in the amygdalae of 7 neurosurgical patients with implanted depth electrodes. We presented degraded fear and happy faces and asked subjects to discriminate their emotion by button press. During trials where subjects responded correctly, we found neurons that distinguished fear vs. happy emotions as expressed by the displayed faces. During incorrect trials, these neurons indicated the patients' subjective judgment. Additional analysis revealed that, on average, all neuronal responses were modulated most by increases or decreases in response to happy faces, and driven predominantly by judgments about the eye region of the face stimuli. Following the same analyses, we showed that hippocampal neurons, unlike amygdala neurons, only encoded emotions but not subjective judgment. Our results suggest that the amygdala specifically encodes the subjective judgment of emotional faces, but that it plays less of a role in simply encoding aspects of the image array. The conscious percept of the emotion shown in a face may thus arise from interactions between the amygdala and its connections within a distributed cortical network, a scheme also consistent with the long response latencies observed in human amygdala recordings.

SUBMITTER: Wang S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4121793 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion.

Wang Shuo S Tudusciuc Oana O Mamelak Adam N AN Ross Ian B IB Adolphs Ralph R Rutishauser Ueli U

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20140630 30

The human amygdala plays a key role in recognizing facial emotions and neurons in the monkey and human amygdala respond to the emotional expression of faces. However, it remains unknown whether these responses are driven primarily by properties of the stimulus or by the perceptual judgments of the perceiver. We investigated these questions by recording from over 200 single neurons in the amygdalae of 7 neurosurgical patients with implanted depth electrodes. We presented degraded fear and happy f ...[more]

PMID: 24982200

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Project description:The amygdala is a key structure mediating emotional processing. Few studies have used direct electrical stimulation of the amygdala in humans to examine stimulation-elicited physiological and emotional responses, and the nature of such effects remains unclear. Determining the effects of electrical stimulation of the amygdala has important theoretical implications for current discrete and dimensional neurobiological theories of emotion, which differ substantially in their predictions about the emotional effects of such stimulation. To examine the effects of amygdala stimulation on physiological and subjective emotional responses we examined epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial EEG monitoring in which depth electrodes were implanted unilaterally or bilaterally in the amygdala. Nine subjects underwent both sham and acute monopolar electrical stimulation at various parameters in electrode contacts located in amygdala and within lateral temporal cortex control locations. Stimulation was applied at either 50 Hz or 130 Hz, while amplitudes were increased stepwise from 1 to 12 V, with subjects blinded to stimulation condition. Electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR), and respiratory rate (RR) were simultaneously recorded and subjective emotional response was probed after each stimulation period. Amygdala stimulation (but not lateral control or sham stimulation) elicited immediate and substantial dose-dependent increases in EDA and decelerations of HR, generally without affecting RR. Stimulation elicited subjective emotional responses only rarely, and did not elicit clinical seizures in any subject. These physiological results parallel stimulation findings with animals and are consistent with orienting/defensive responses observed with aversive visual stimuli in humans. In summary, these findings suggest that acute amygdala stimulation in humans can be safe and can reliably elicit changes in emotion physiology without significantly affecting subjective emotional experience, providing a useful approach for investigation of amygdala-mediated modulatory effects on cognition.

Dataset Information

Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion.

Publications

Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion.

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