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