Dataset Information

The human amygdala parametrically encodes the intensity of specific facial emotions and their categorical ambiguity.

ABSTRACT: The human amygdala is a key structure for processing emotional facial expressions, but it remains unclear what aspects of emotion are processed. We investigated this question with three different approaches: behavioural analysis of 3 amygdala lesion patients, neuroimaging of 19 healthy adults, and single-neuron recordings in 9 neurosurgical patients. The lesion patients showed a shift in behavioural sensitivity to fear, and amygdala BOLD responses were modulated by both fear and emotion ambiguity (the uncertainty that a facial expression is categorized as fearful or happy). We found two populations of neurons, one whose response correlated with increasing degree of fear, or happiness, and a second whose response primarily decreased as a linear function of emotion ambiguity. Together, our results indicate that the human amygdala processes both the degree of emotion in facial expressions and the categorical ambiguity of the emotion shown and that these two aspects of amygdala processing can be most clearly distinguished at the level of single neurons.

SUBMITTER: Wang S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5413952 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The human amygdala parametrically encodes the intensity of specific facial emotions and their categorical ambiguity.

Wang Shuo S Yu Rongjun R Tyszka J Michael JM Zhen Shanshan S Kovach Christopher C Sun Sai S Huang Yi Y Hurlemann Rene R Ross Ian B IB Chung Jeffrey M JM Mamelak Adam N AN Adolphs Ralph R Rutishauser Ueli U

Nature communications 20170421

The human amygdala is a key structure for processing emotional facial expressions, but it remains unclear what aspects of emotion are processed. We investigated this question with three different approaches: behavioural analysis of 3 amygdala lesion patients, neuroimaging of 19 healthy adults, and single-neuron recordings in 9 neurosurgical patients. The lesion patients showed a shift in behavioural sensitivity to fear, and amygdala BOLD responses were modulated by both fear and emotion ambiguit ...[more]

PMID: 28429707

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Dataset Information

The human amygdala parametrically encodes the intensity of specific facial emotions and their categorical ambiguity.

Publications

The human amygdala parametrically encodes the intensity of specific facial emotions and their categorical ambiguity.

Similar Datasets

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