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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on April 2, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsm002
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The BOLD signal in the amygdala does not differentiate between dynamic facial expressions

Christiaan van der Gaag1,2, Ruud B. Minderaa2 and Christian Keysers1

1BCN NeuroImaging Center, University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen and 2Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

The amygdala has been considered to be essential for recognizing fear in other people's facial expressions. Recent studies shed doubt on this interpretation. Here we used movies of facial expressions instead of static photographs to investigate the putative fear selectivity of the amygdala using fMRI under more ecological conditions. The amygdala was found to respond more to movies of facial expressions than to pattern motion, but no differences were found between the responses to neutral, happy, disgusted and fearful facial expressions. This lack of emotional selectivity was replicated in three experiments using three different tasks (passive observation, delayed match to sample and viewing for imitation) and two different analysis methods (voxel-by-voxel and anatomical region of interest). Our data therefore provide strong support for the idea that under more ecologically valid conditions, the contribution of the amygdala towards the detection of fearful facial expressions must be more indirect than previously assumed.

Keywords: fMRI; amygdala; movies; emotions; facial expressions; non-selectivity

Correspondence should be addressed to Christian Keysers, School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences NeuroImaging Center, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, 9713 AW Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: c.m.keysers{at}rug.nl

Received January 20, 2007. Accepted February 1, 2007.


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