Amygdala activation during reading of emotional adjectives--an advantage for pleasant content |
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Authors: | Herbert Cornelia; Ethofer Thomas; Anders Silke; Junghofer Markus; Wildgruber Dirk; Grodd Wolfgang; Kissler Johanna |
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Institution: | 1Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, 2Section Experimental MR of the CNS, Department of Neuroradiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, 3Department of Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, and 4Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, Münster, Germany |
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Abstract: | This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)study investigated brain activity elicited by emotional adjectivesduring silent reading without specific processing instructions.Fifteen healthy volunteers were asked to read a set of randomlypresented high-arousing emotional (pleasant and unpleasant)and low-arousing neutral adjectives. Silent reading of emotionalin contrast to neutral adjectives evoked enhanced activationsin visual, limbic and prefrontal brain regions. In particular,reading pleasant adjectives produced a more robust activationpattern in the left amygdala and the left extrastriate visualcortex than did reading unpleasant or neutral adjectives. Moreover,extrastriate visual cortex and amygdala activity were significantlycorrelated during reading of pleasant adjectives. Furthermore,pleasant adjectives were better remembered than unpleasant andneutral adjectives in a surprise free recall test conductedafter scanning. Thus, visual processing was biased towards pleasantwords and involved the amygdala, underscoring recent theoreticalviews of a general role of the human amygdala in relevance detectionfor both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. Results indicate preferentialprocessing of pleasant information in healthy young adults andcan be accounted for within the framework of appraisal theory. |
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