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Brief Communications

Visual Attention Modulates Brain Activation to Angry Voices

Martin Mothes-Lasch, Hans-Joachim Mentzel, Wolfgang H. R. Miltner and Thomas Straube
Journal of Neuroscience 29 June 2011, 31 (26) 9594-9598; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6665-10.2011
Martin Mothes-Lasch
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Hans-Joachim Mentzel
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Wolfgang H. R. Miltner
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Thomas Straube
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Abstract

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.

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The Journal of Neuroscience: 31 (26)
Journal of Neuroscience
Vol. 31, Issue 26
29 Jun 2011
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Visual Attention Modulates Brain Activation to Angry Voices
Martin Mothes-Lasch, Hans-Joachim Mentzel, Wolfgang H. R. Miltner, Thomas Straube
Journal of Neuroscience 29 June 2011, 31 (26) 9594-9598; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6665-10.2011

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Visual Attention Modulates Brain Activation to Angry Voices
Martin Mothes-Lasch, Hans-Joachim Mentzel, Wolfgang H. R. Miltner, Thomas Straube
Journal of Neuroscience 29 June 2011, 31 (26) 9594-9598; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6665-10.2011
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  • The Responses to Angry versus Neutral Prosody
    Peng Huang
    Published on: 22 August 2011
  • Published on: (22 August 2011)
    Page navigation anchor for The Responses to Angry versus Neutral Prosody
    The Responses to Angry versus Neutral Prosody
    • Peng Huang
    • Other Contributors:
      • Danmin Miao and Xia Zhu

    Mothes-Lasch et al. investigated neural responses to angry versus neutral prosodic stimuli during visual distraction using fMRI. The auditory task was associated with pronounced activation in the auditory cortex and amygdala in response to angry versus neutral prosody, which was absent during the visual task. There are many similar studies about automatic responses to angry prosody in the amygdala (Sander et al., 2005; Ba...

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    Mothes-Lasch et al. investigated neural responses to angry versus neutral prosodic stimuli during visual distraction using fMRI. The auditory task was associated with pronounced activation in the auditory cortex and amygdala in response to angry versus neutral prosody, which was absent during the visual task. There are many similar studies about automatic responses to angry prosody in the amygdala (Sander et al., 2005; Bach et al., 2008). In fact, not only angry prosody, but also sad or happy prosody have been shown to induce responses in amygdala. (Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003; Wiethoff et al., 2009).

    Some event-related potential (ERP) studies (Schirmer & Escoffier, 2010; De Pascalis et al., 2005) have reported auditory and visual mismatch negativity (MMN), which is sensitive to unattended, emotionally relevant change and is considered a marker of the pre-attentive processing of threat. In the current paper, Mothes-Lasch et al. only showed the results of fMRI. There are disadvantages to using this technique, notably the production of high amplitude acoustic noise (~110 dB) during image acquisition (Amaro et al., 2002) and low time resolution compared to ERP. Therefore, we think it would be valuable to do a similar study combining the fMRI and ERP (Dale et al., 2000; Iidaka et al., 2006). The results of such a study might be more revealing and more easily interpreted.

    References:

    Amaro Jr, E., Williams, S. C. R., Shergill, S. S., Fu, C. H. Y., MacSweeney, M., & Picchioni, M. M., et al. (2002). Acoustic noise and functional magnetic resonance imaging: current strategies and future prospects. Journal of magnetic resonance imaging, 16(5), 497-510.

    Bach, D. R., Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Herdener, M., Strik, W. K., & Seifritz, E. (2008). The effect of appraisal level on processing of emotional prosody in meaningless speech. Neuroimage, 42(2), 919-927.

    Dale, A. M., Liu, A. K., Fischl, B. R., Buckner, R. L., Belliveau, J. W., & Lewine, J. D., et al. (2000). Dynamic Statistical Parametric Mapping: Combining fMRI and MEG for High-Resolution Imaging of Cortical Activity. Neuron, 26(1), 55-67.

    De Pascalis, V., Arwari, B., Matteucci, M., & Mazzocco, A. (2005). Effects of emotional visual stimuli on auditory information processing: a test of JA Gray's reinforcement sensitivity theory. Personality and individual differences, 38(1), 163-176.

    Iidaka, T., Matsumoto, A., Haneda, K., Okada, T., & Sadato, N. (2006). Hemodynamic and electrophysiological relationship involved in human face processing: evidence from a combined fMRI-ERP study. Brain and cognition, 60(2), 176-186.

    Sander, D., Grafman, J., & Zalla, T. (2003). The human amygdala: an evolved system for relevance detection. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 14(4), 303-316.

    Sander, D., Grandjean, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M. L., & Scherer, K. R., et al. (2005). Emotion and attention interactions in social cognition: Brain regions involved in processing anger prosody. Neuroimage, 28(4), 848-858.

    Schirmer, A., & Escoffier, N. (2010). Emotional MMN: Anxiety and heart rate correlate with the ERP signature for auditory change detection. Clinical Neurophysiology, 121(1), 53-59.

    Wiethoff, S., Wildgruber, D., Grodd, W., & Ethofer, T. (2009). Response and habituation of the amygdala during processing of emotional prosody. Neuroreport, 20(15), 1356.

    Conflict of Interest:

    None declared

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    Competing Interests: None declared.

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