Fear, faces, and the human amygdala
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The amygdala's historical role in processing stimuli related to threat and fear is being modified to suggest a role that is broader and more abstract. Amygdala lesions impair the ability to seek out and make use of the eye region of faces, resulting in impaired fear perception. Other studies in rats and humans revive earlier proposals that the amygdala is important not only for fear perception as such, but also for detecting saliency and biological relevance. Debates about some features of this processing now suggest that while the amygdala can process fearful facial expressions in the absence of conscious perception, and while there is some degree of preattentive processing, this depends on the context and is not necessarily more rapid than cortical processing routes. A large current research effort extends the amygdala's putative role to a number of psychiatric illnesses.
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The amygdala is a brain area implicated in the processing of social cues that denote threat.
“the amygdala, a brain area that has been implicated in the processing of social cues that denote threat [51]”
From A direct examination of the effect of intranasal administration of oxytocin on approach-avoidance motor responses to emotional stimuli (2013) · cites this paper as [51]
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Chai, X. J., Hirshfeld-Becker, D., Biederman, J., Uchida, M., Doehrmann, O., Leonard, J. A., Salvatore, J., Kenworthy, T., Brown, A., Kagan, E., et al. (2015) · NeuroImage: Clinical · doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2015.05.004 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
Sun, S., Yu, H., Yu, R., & Wang, S. (2023) · Translational Psychiatry · doi:10.1038/s41398-023-02625-w · Cited by 69 · see citing works
“The amygdala has long been associated with a key role in recognizing facial emotions [2, 6, 7].”
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Experimental research on dreaming: state of the art and neuropsychoanalytic perspectives
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Generative models for active vision
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Brief Report: Does Eye Contact Induce Contagious Yawning in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?
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The influence of directed covert attention on emotional face processing
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Offline consolidation of procedural skill learning is enhanced by negative emotional content
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Is fear perception special? Evidence at the level of decision-making and subjective confidence
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- Authors
- Adolphs, R.
- Affiliations
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Adolphs, Ralph
- ORCID
- Adolphs, Ralph
- Venue
- Current Opinion in Neurobiology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2008-04
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 166-172
- ISSN
- 0959-4388 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2580742
- OpenAlex
- W2044394944
- Cited by
- 502
- References
- 72
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 27 · 2018: 33 · 2017: 27 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 33 · 2012: 42
- FWCI
- 2.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Current Opinion in Neurobiology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH080721, R01MH067681)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Keywords
- amygdala, fear perception, facial expressions, threat processing, amygdala lesions, saliency detection, biological relevance, conscious perception, preattentive processing, mental illness
- MeSH terms
- Amygdala, Animals, Discrimination Learning, Emotions, Facial Expression, Fear, Humans, Mental Processes, Visual Perception
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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