title: Cortical brain regions engaged by masked emotional faces in adolescents and adults: an fMRI study.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-0135, USA. daniel.pine@nih.gov
authors.forename: D S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Pine
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grun
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Zarahn
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fyer
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Koda
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: P R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Szeszko
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ardekani
authors.forename: R M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Bilder
mesh_terms: 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*