Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 39, Issue 2, 15 January 2008, Pages 894-902
NeuroImage

Dissociated responses in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex to bottom–up and top–down components of emotional evaluation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.09.014Get rights and content

Abstract

Although emotional responses to stimuli may be automatic, explicit evaluation of emotion is a voluntary act. These bottom–up and top–down processes may be supported by distinct neural systems. Previous studies reported bottom–up responses in the amygdala, top–down responses in the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, and top–down modulation of the amygdalar response. The current study used event-related fMRI on fifteen healthy males to examine these responses in the absence of stimulus anticipation or task repetition. Factorial analysis distinguished bottom–up responses in the amygdala from top–down responses in the orbitofrontal cortex. Activation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and modulation of amygdalar response were not observed, and future studies may investigate whether these effects are contingent upon anticipation or cognitive set.

Section snippets

Subjects

Sixteen healthy male participants gave informed consent as approved by the University of Florida's Institutional Review Board. The participants' ages ranged from 18 to 24 (M = 19.67, SD = 1.63). The participants had no history of psychiatric or neurological illness, and were taking no psychotropic medication at the time of the study. One participant was excluded due to discrete head movements greater than 1 mm during scanning.

Picture rating task paradigm

Participants viewed pictures from the International Affective Picture

Behavioral data

Participants rated pleasant and unpleasant stimuli appropriately. Pleasure ratings, adjusted from the obtained four-button responses to the standard scale used in the IAPS of 1–9 were significantly higher for pleasant pictures than for unpleasant pictures (6.6 ± 0.9 vs. 3.6 ± 0.8, p < 0.001). Participants made use of all four buttons during the emotion rating task, rather than simplifying the task by using only the index finger for unpleasant and the little finger for pleasant pictures (Table 1). In

Discussion

In this study, we confirmed that distinct neural networks responded to top–down and bottom–up components of emotional evaluation. As hypothesized, top–down effects were observed in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and bottom–up effects in the amygdala. Contrary to previous studies, we did not observe top–down responses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and we observed no modulation of the amygdala. Using an event-related paradigm to investigate emotional evaluation, we replicated

Acknowledgments

This research was facilitated by grants R03 MH072776, R01 NR08325 and K02 MH075616 from the National Institutes of Health.

We thank Profs. Christiana Leonard, Dawn Bowers, and Russell Bauer for helpful suggestions.

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