Visual Attention Modulates Brain Activation to Angry Voices

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:

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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