TY - JOUR T1 - Visual Attention Modulates Brain Activation to Angry Voices JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 9594 LP - 9598 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6665-10.2011 VL - 31 IS - 26 AU - Martin Mothes-Lasch AU - Hans-Joachim Mentzel AU - Wolfgang H. R. Miltner AU - Thomas Straube Y1 - 2011/06/29 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/26/9594.abstract N2 - In accordance with influential models proposing prioritized processing of threat, previous studies have shown automatic brain responses to angry prosody in the amygdala and the auditory cortex under auditory distraction conditions. However, it is unknown whether the automatic processing of angry prosody is also observed during cross-modal distraction. The current fMRI study investigated brain responses to angry versus neutral prosodic stimuli during visual distraction. During scanning, participants were exposed to angry or neutral prosodic stimuli while visual symbols were displayed simultaneously. By means of task requirements, participants either attended to the voices or to the visual stimuli. While the auditory task revealed pronounced activation in the auditory cortex and amygdala to angry versus neutral prosody, this effect was absent during the visual task. Thus, our results show a limitation of the automaticity of the activation of the amygdala and auditory cortex to angry prosody. The activation of these areas to threat-related voices depends on modality-specific attention. ER -