A preferential increase in the extrastriate response to signals of danger

Abstract

This study examined neural responses in nine right-handed healthy individuals while they viewed mild and intense expressions of four emotions (fear, disgust, happiness, and sadness) contrasted with neutral faces in four event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments. Orthogonal polynomial trend analysis revealed a significant linear increase in the fusiform extrastriate cortical response to increasing intensities of all four emotional expressions, which was significantly greater to increasing intensities of fear and disgust than happiness and sadness, and a significant linear decrease in response to sadness in another extrastriate region. The amygdala was activated by high-intensity fearful expressions, consistent with findings from previous studies, and by low- but not high-intensity sad expressions. Significant linear increases in response to increasing intensities of fear, disgust, and happiness occurred within the hippocampus, anterior insula, and putamen, respectively. Conversely, significant linear decreases in hippocampal and putamen responses occurred to increasing intensities of sadness. We provide the first demonstration of differential increases in extrastriate and limbic responses to signals of increasing danger than to those of other emotions, and significant decreases in these responses to signals of increasing sadness in others. We suggest that this differential pattern of response to different categories of emotional signals allows the preferential direction of visual attention to signals of imminent danger than to other, less-salient emotional stimuli.