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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on September 27, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsn027
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Amygdala activation during reading of emotional adjectives—an advantage for pleasant content

Cornelia Herbert1, Thomas Ethofer2,3, Silke Anders2, Markus Junghofer4, Dirk Wildgruber3, Wolfgang Grodd2 and Johanna Kissler1

1Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, 2Section Experimental MR of the CNS, Department of Neuroradiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, 3Department of Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, and 4Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated brain activity elicited by emotional adjectives during silent reading without specific processing instructions. Fifteen healthy volunteers were asked to read a set of randomly presented high-arousing emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) and low-arousing neutral adjectives. Silent reading of emotional in contrast to neutral adjectives evoked enhanced activations in visual, limbic and prefrontal brain regions. In particular, reading pleasant adjectives produced a more robust activation pattern in the left amygdala and the left extrastriate visual cortex than did reading unpleasant or neutral adjectives. Moreover, extrastriate visual cortex and amygdala activity were significantly correlated during reading of pleasant adjectives. Furthermore, pleasant adjectives were better remembered than unpleasant and neutral adjectives in a surprise free recall test conducted after scanning. Thus, visual processing was biased towards pleasant words and involved the amygdala, underscoring recent theoretical views of a general role of the human amygdala in relevance detection for both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. Results indicate preferential processing of pleasant information in healthy young adults and can be accounted for within the framework of appraisal theory.

Keywords: emotion; perception; re-entrant processing; reading; amygdala; extrastriate cortex; neuroimaging

Correspondence should be addressed to Johanna Kissler, Department of Psychology, Box D25, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany. E-mail: johanna.kissler{at}uni-konstanz.de

Received July 18, 2008. Accepted July 29, 2008.


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