TY - JOUR
T1 - Amygdala responses to positively and negatively valenced baby faces in healthy female volunteers
T2 - Influences of individual differences in harm avoidance
AU - Baeken, Chris
AU - De Raedt, Rudi
AU - Ramsey, Nick
AU - Van Schuerbeek, Peter
AU - Hermes, Dora
AU - Bossuyt, Axel
AU - Leyman, Lemke
AU - Vanderhasselt, Marie Anne
AU - De Mey, Johan
AU - Luypaert, Robert
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a grant from the Scientific Fund W. Gepts UZ Brussel. The authors wish to acknowledge the important contribution to this research of Prof. Dr. Hugo D’haenen, and we regret his sudden passing. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Pamela Dalby of The Free University of Brussels (V.U.B.) for support in language revision and Dr. P. Marchand for estimating the age of the depicted babies.
PY - 2009/10/16
Y1 - 2009/10/16
N2 - Research regarding the lateralization of processing emotional visual stimuli suggests various roles for affective information-processing by the amygdalae. However, individual differences seem to influence outcome results. In this study we re-investigate this question, paying special attention to the salient nature of the mood inducing stimuli. We presented blocks of happy looking baby faces and sad looking baby faces (disfigured by severe dermatological conditions), as well as blurred isoluminescent neutral pictures to a 'homogeneous' group of 40 healthy female subjects during fMRI. We used the temperament dimension harm avoidance (HA), extracted from the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), to evaluate the impact of this personality feature on 'emotional' amygdala responses. HA is related to behavioral inhibition and it implies a genetically determined bias towards being cautious, apprehensive and overly pessimistic. Because emotional valence and arousal may be controlled by different neural systems, the positively and negatively valenced baby faces were selected to be equal in arousal levels. Viewing blocks of negatively valenced baby faces evoked bilateral amygdala activity, whereas viewing positively valenced ones resulted in left amygdala activity only. Globally, we found no evidence of lateralized amygdala specialization. When taking into account individual differences in HA, only in female subjects who score high on this dimension did we find predominantly left amygdala activation when viewing blocks of negatively valenced baby faces. HA did not influence amygdala activity when processing positively valenced images. Our results might indicate that personality features, such as HA, could be of importance in 'emotional' fMRI paradigms examining amygdala lateralization patterns.
AB - Research regarding the lateralization of processing emotional visual stimuli suggests various roles for affective information-processing by the amygdalae. However, individual differences seem to influence outcome results. In this study we re-investigate this question, paying special attention to the salient nature of the mood inducing stimuli. We presented blocks of happy looking baby faces and sad looking baby faces (disfigured by severe dermatological conditions), as well as blurred isoluminescent neutral pictures to a 'homogeneous' group of 40 healthy female subjects during fMRI. We used the temperament dimension harm avoidance (HA), extracted from the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), to evaluate the impact of this personality feature on 'emotional' amygdala responses. HA is related to behavioral inhibition and it implies a genetically determined bias towards being cautious, apprehensive and overly pessimistic. Because emotional valence and arousal may be controlled by different neural systems, the positively and negatively valenced baby faces were selected to be equal in arousal levels. Viewing blocks of negatively valenced baby faces evoked bilateral amygdala activity, whereas viewing positively valenced ones resulted in left amygdala activity only. Globally, we found no evidence of lateralized amygdala specialization. When taking into account individual differences in HA, only in female subjects who score high on this dimension did we find predominantly left amygdala activation when viewing blocks of negatively valenced baby faces. HA did not influence amygdala activity when processing positively valenced images. Our results might indicate that personality features, such as HA, could be of importance in 'emotional' fMRI paradigms examining amygdala lateralization patterns.
KW - Amygdala
KW - Harm avoidance
KW - Healthy female volunteer
KW - Lateralization
KW - fMRI
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U2 - 10.1016/j.brainres.2009.08.010
DO - 10.1016/j.brainres.2009.08.010
M3 - Article
C2 - 19679112
AN - SCOPUS:70349292077
SN - 0006-8993
VL - 1296
SP - 94
EP - 103
JO - Brain Research
JF - Brain Research
ER -