Lateralized interactive social content and valence processing within the human amygdala.
In the past, the amygdala has generally been conceptualized as a fear-processing module. Recently, however, it has been proposed to respond to all stimuli that are relevant with respect to the current needs, goals, and values of an individual. This raises the question of whether the human amygdala may differentiate between separate kinds of relevance. A distinction between emotional (vs. neutral) and social (vs. non-social) relevance is supported by previous studies showing that the human amygdala preferentially responds to both emotionally and socially significant information, and these factors might even display interactive encoding properties. However, no investigation has yet probed a full 2 (positive vs. negative valence) × 2 (social vs. non-social content) processing pattern, with neutral images as an additional baseline. Applying such an extended orthogonal factorial design, our fMRI study demonstrates that the human amygdala is (1) more strongly activated for neutral social vs. non-social information, (2) activated at a similar level when viewing social positive or negative images, but (3) displays a valence effect (negative vs. positive) for non-social images. In addition, this encoding pattern is not influenced by cognitive or behavioral emotion regulation mechanisms, and displays a hemispheric lateralization with more pronounced effects on the right side. Finally, the same valence × social content interaction was found in three additional cortical regions, namely the right fusiform gyrus, right anterior superior temporal gyrus, and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Overall, these findings suggest that valence and social content processing represent distinct kinds of relevance that interact within the human amygdala as well as in a more extensive cortical network, likely subserving a key role in relevance detection.
Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, Stanford University Stanford, CA, USA ; Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland ; Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neurology and Department of Neurosciences, University Hospital and Medical School, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland ; Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression (E3 Lab), Department of Psychology, FPSE, University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
Pascal
P
Vrtička
David
D
Sander
Patrik
P
Vuilleumier