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The privileged status of emotion in the brain.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Davidson, Richard J. Maxwell, Jeffrey S. Shackman, Alexander J. |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | The recent report in PNAS by Ishai et al . (1) is part of a growing corpus of literature that establishes the privileged status of emotional stimuli for the brain. Stimuli that convey emotion command attention and enjoy enhanced processing in a distributed network of brain regions that represents different features of the stimulus and options for responding to such stimuli (2). There are two findings in the Ishai et al . article that are consistent with this framework: ( i ) subjects respond more quickly and more accurately to fear relative to neutral targets; and ( ii ) in all face-responsive regions of interest in the brain (see Fig. 1), fear faces were associated with relatively greater activation than neutral faces were during several phases of the experiment, including during initial encoding of the stimuli, in response to the first match of the target to the memoranda, and in response to the distracter stimuli. These findings are consistent with the notion that stimuli of affective import command extensive resources and are strongly and broadly represented in the brain. The third major observation reported by Ishai et al . is their featured finding, and it is somewhat counterintuitive. They find that in all face regions of interest repetition of fearful targets was associated with stronger suppression effects than repetition of neutral targets was. In other words, activation levels were found to decrease more with repetition of attended fear faces than attended neutral faces. Furthermore, neither fear nor neutral distracters were associated with repetition suppression. In this Commentary, we first discuss some empirical and methodological features of the experiment that is reported and then highlight some important implications of these data and raise questions for future research. Fig. 1. The distributed representation of visual emotional stimuli in the human brain. ( A ) The network of face-responsive regions examined … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1073/pnas.0404264101 |
| PubMed reference number | 15304648 |
| Journal | Medline |
| Volume Number | 101 |
| Issue Number | 33 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://psyc.umd.edu/sites/psyc.umd.edu/files/pubs/davidson_shackman_pnas2004.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://psyc.umd.edu/sites/psyc.umd.edu/files/pubs/davidson_shackman_pnas2004.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.psychology.umd.edu/sites/psyc.umd.edu/files/pubs/davidson_shackman_pnas2004.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0404264101 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
