Recent brain imaging and lesion studies provide converging evidence for amygdala involvement in judgments of fear and trust based on facial expression [Adolphs et al., Nature 393 (1998) 470; Adolphs et al., Neuropsychologia 37 (1999) 1111; Breiter et al., Neuron 17 (1996) 875; Winston et al., Nat. Neurosci. 5 (3) (2002) 277]. Another type of social information apparent in face stimuli is social...

Introduction: Many studies have shown that amygdala kindling produces synaptic potentiation by induction of changes in the neuronal electrophysiological properties and inward currents both in epileptic focus and in the areas which are in connection with the epileptic focus and have important role in seizure development and progression such as hippocampal CA1 region. However, cellular mechani...

In the context of emotion information processing, several studies have demonstrated the involvement of the amygdala in emotion perception, for unimodal and multimodal stimuli. However, it seems that not only the amygdala, but several regions around it, may also play a major role in multimodal emotional integration. In order to investigate the contribution of these regions to multimodal emotion ...

The amygdala is consistently implicated in biologically relevant learning tasks such as Pavlovian conditioning. In humans, the ability to identify individual faces based on the social outcomes they have predicted in the past constitutes a critical form of associative learning that can be likened to "social conditioning." To capture such learning in a laboratory setting, participants learned abo...

Although the role of the amygdala in acquisition of conditioned fear is well established, there is debate concerning the intra-amygdala circuits involved. The lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA) is thought to be an essential site of plasticity in fear conditioning. The LA has both direct and indirect [via the basal nuclei; basal amygdala (BA)] projections to the central nucleus (Ce) of the amy...

BACKGROUND Dysfunction in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is believed to play a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of mood and anxiety disorders. Leading neurocircuitry models of these disorders propose that hypoactivity in the vmPFC engenders disinhibited activity of the amygdala and, consequently, pathologically elevated levels of negative affect. This model predicts that a selective...

Lesion and neuroimaging studies suggest the amygdala is important in the perception and production of negative emotion; however, the effects of emotion regulation on the amygdalar response to negative stimuli remain unknown. Using event-related fMRI, we tested the hypothesis that voluntary modulation of negative emotion is associated with changes in neural activity within the amygdala. Negative...

Visual pathways to the amygdala, a brain structure critical for classical fear conditioning, were investigated. Conditioned fear was measured in rats as increased acoustic startle amplitude in the presence versus absence of a light or an odor paired previously with foot shock (fear-potentiated startle). Post-training lesions of both the lateral geniculate body (LG) and lateral posterior nucleus...

The emergence of stereotypies was examined in juvenile rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) who, at 2 weeks of postnatal age, received selective bilateral ibotenic acid lesions of the amygdala (N = 8) or hippocampus (N = 8). The lesion groups were compared to age-matched control subjects that received a sham surgical procedure (N = 8). All subjects were maternally reared for the first 6 months and p...

This study continues a longitudinal analysis of rhesus macaque social behavior following bilateral neonatal ibotenic acid lesions of the amygdala or hippocampus, or sham operations. The social behavior of female subjects was evaluated at a critical developmental time point-the transition to adulthood. At approximately 4 years of age, female subjects were housed in small groups with other female...