Seeing the world through non rose-colored glasses: anxiety and the amygdala response to blended expressions.

Autor: Sonia eBishop, Geoffrey K Aguirre, Anwar O Nunez-Elizalde, Daniel eToker
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Vol 9 (2015)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1662-5161
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00152
Popis: Anxious individuals have a greater tendency to categorize faces with ambiguous emotional expressions as fearful (Richards et al., 2002). These behavioral findings might reflect anxiety-related biases in stimulus representation within the human amygdala. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with a continuous adaptation design to investigate the representation of faces from three expression continua (surprise-fear, sadness–fear and surprise-sadness) within the amygdala and other brain regions implicated in face processing. Fifty-four healthy adult participants completed a face expression categorization task. Nineteen of these participants also viewed the same expressions presented using type 1 index 1 sequences while fMRI data were acquired. Behavioral analyses revealed an anxiety-related categorization bias in the surprise-fear continuum alone. Here, elevated anxiety was associated with a more rapid transition from surprise to fear responses as a function of percentage fear in the face presented, leading to increased fear categorizations for faces with a mid-way blend of surprise and fear. FMRI analyses revealed that high trait anxious participants also showed greater representational similarity, as indexed by greater adaptation of the BOLD signal, between 50/50 surprise/fear expression blends and faces from the fear end of the surprise-fear continuum in both the right amygdala and right fusiform face area (FFA). No equivalent biases were observed for the other expression continua. These findings suggest that anxiety-related biases in the processing of expressions intermediate between surprise and fear may be linked to differential representation of these stimuli in the amygdala and FFA. The absence of anxiety-related biases for the sad-fear continuum might reflect intermediate expressions from the surprise-fear continuum being most ambiguous in threat-relevance.
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