Abstract
This study examined what is communicated by facial expressions of anger and mapped the neural substrates, evaluating the motivational salience of these stimuli. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, angry and neutral faces were presented to human subjects. Across experimental runs, signal adaptation was observed. Whereas fearful faces have reproducibly evoked response habituation in amygdala and prefrontal cortex, angry faces evoked sensitization in the insula, cingulate, thalamus, basal ganglia, and hippocampus. Complementary offline rating and keypress experiments determined an aversive rank ordering of angry, fearful, neutral, and happy faces and revealed behavioral sensitization to the angry faces. Subjects rated angry faces, in contrast to other face categories such as fear, as significantly more likely to directly inflict harm. Furthermore, they rated angry faces as significantly less likely to produce positive emotional outcomes than the other face categories. Together these data argue that angry faces, a directly aversive stimulus, produce a sensitization response.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 389-413 |
Number of pages | 25 |
Journal | Neuroimage |
Volume | 26 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2005 |
Funding
This work was supported by grants to H.C.B. (#00265, #09467, and #14118) from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Bethesda, MD, and a grant (The Phenotype Genotype Project in Addiction and Depression) from the Office of National Drug Control Policy-Counterdrug for Technology Assessment Center (ONDCP-CTAC), Washington, D.C. This work was further supported, in part, by the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Radiology, the National Center for Research Resources (P41RR14075), and the Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery (MIND) Institute. Support in part was also provided to M.M.S. from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI; through NASA Cooperative Agreement NCC 9-58) and an NSBRI internship. We thank Tim Heeren for statistical consultation, Mary Foley for technical assistance, Jeanette Cohan for administrative assistance, and Howard Eichenbaum, Bruce Rosen, Jeffrey Sutton, Stefan Hofmann, Alice Cronin-Golomb, and David Borsook for experimental and editorial guidance.
Keywords
- Aversion
- Emotion
- Habituation
- Learning
- Pain
- Stress
- Utility
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neurology
- Cognitive Neuroscience