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Impaired threat prioritisation after selective bilateral amygdala lesions.
Journal article

Impaired threat prioritisation after selective bilateral amygdala lesions.

  • Bach DR Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, UK; Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Electronic address: dominik.bach@uzh.ch.
  • Hurlemann R Department of Psychiatry, University of Bonn, Germany.
  • Dolan RJ Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, UK.
  • 2014-10-06
Published in:
  • Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior. - 2015
Amygdala lesion
Facial expression
Fear
Serial search
Threat
Urbach–Wiethe
Adult
Amygdala
Emotions
Facial Expression
Fear
Female
Humans
Judgment
Lipoid Proteinosis of Urbach and Wiethe
Reaction Time
Recognition, Psychology
Social Perception
English The amygdala is proposed to process threat-related information in non-human animals. In humans, empirical evidence from lesion studies has provided the strongest evidence for a role in emotional face recognition and social judgement. Here we use a face-in-the-crowd (FITC) task which in healthy control individuals reveals prioritised threat processing, evident in faster serial search for angry compared to happy target faces. We investigate AM and BG, two individuals with bilateral amygdala lesions due to Urbach-Wiethe syndrome, and 16 control individuals. In lesion patients we show a reversal of a threat detection advantage indicating a profound impairment in prioritising threat information. This is the first direct demonstration that human amygdala lesions impair prioritisation of threatening faces, providing evidence that this structure has a causal role in responding to imminent danger.
Language
  • English
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/263422
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