Cortical brain regions engaged by masked emotional faces in adolescents and adults: an fMRI study.
Face-emotion processing has shown signs of developmental change during adolescence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used on 10 adolescents and 10 adults to contrast brain regions engaged by a masked emotional-face task (viewing a fixation cross and a series of masked happy and masked fearful faces), while blood oxygen level dependent signal was monitored by a 1.5-T MRI scanner. Brain regions differentially engaged in the 2 age groups were mapped by using statistical parametric mapping. Summed across groups, the contrast of masked face versus fixation-cross viewing generated activations in occipital-temporal regions previously activated in passive face-viewing tasks. Adolescents showed higher maxima for activations in posterior association cortex for 3 of the 4 statistical contrasts. Adolescents and adults differed in the degree to which posterior hemisphere brain areas were engaged by viewing masked facial displays of emotion.
Pine
D S
DS
Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-0135, USA. daniel.pine@nih.gov
Grun
J
J
Zarahn
E
E
Fyer
A
A
Koda
V
V
Li
W
W
Szeszko
P R
PR
Ardekani
B
B
Bilder
R M
RM
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000367:Age Factors; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*