A Developmental Examination of Amygdala Response to Facial Expressions

By A. Guyer, Christopher S. Monk, Erin B. McClure-Tone, Eric E. Nelson, R. Roberson-Nay, Abby D. Adler, S. Fromm, Ellen Leibenluft, Daniel S. Pine, Monique Ernst. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2008

368 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several lines of evidence implicate the amygdala in face-emotion processing, particularly for fearful facial expressions. Related findings suggest that face-emotion processing engages the amygdala within an interconnected circuitry that can be studied using a functional-connectivity approach. Past work also underscores important functional changes in the amygdala during development. Taken together, prior research on amygdala function and development reveals a need for more work examining developmental changes in the amygdala's response to fearful faces and in amygdala functional connectivity during face processing. The present study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare 31 adolescents (917 years old) and 30 adults (2140 years old) on activation to fearful faces in the amygdala and other regions implicated in face processing. Moreover, these data were used to compare patterns of amygdala functional connectivity in adolescents and adults. During passive viewing, adolescents demonstrated greater amygdala and fusiform activation to fearful faces than did adults. Functional connectivity analysis revealed stronger connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus in adults than in adolescents. Within each group, variability in age did not correlate with amygdala response, and sex-related developmental differences in amygdala response were not found. Eye movement data collected outside of the magnetic resonance imaging scanner using the same task suggested that developmental differences in amygdala activation were not attributable to differences in eye-gaze patterns. Amygdala hyperactivation in response to fearful faces may explain increased vulnerability to affective disorders in adolescence; stronger amygdala-hippocampus connectivity in adults than adolescents may reflect maturation in learning or habituation to facial expressions.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/860c24622b199b7e0ee461a41ebd5e6885e8d043

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Citations in the corpus

A Review of Adversity, The Amygdala and the Hippocampus: A Consideration of Developmental Timing (2009, positive): “…to adulthood, peaking in activity during adolescence before it declines in adulthood (Monk et al., 2003b; Killgore and Yurgelun-Todd, 2007; Guyer et al., 2008; Hare et al., 2008) and this activity is tightly coupled to the modulatory connections of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex…”
A Developmental Shift from Positive to Negative Connectivity in Human Amygdala-Prefrontal Circuitry (2013, background): “The amygdala has shown evidence of early structural development (Giedd et al., 1996; Ulfig et al., 2003; Payne et al., 2010) and functionality (Baird et al., 1999; Thomas et al., 2001; Guyer et al., 2008; Hare et al., 2008).”
The Adolescent Brain and the Emergence and Peak of Psychopathology (2015, result): “These results are consistent with other studies showing that adolescents exhibit heightened amygdala activity to emotional cues relative to adults (Monk et al., 2003; Guyer et al., 2008).”
The development of emotion regulation: an fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal in children, adolescents and young adults. (2012, background): “Previous studies have observed heightened emotional reactivity during adolescence, as indexed by heightened amygdala activation (Williams et al., 2006; Guyer et al., 2008; Hare et al., 2008; Pfeifer et al., 2011) and greater frontal N2 amplitudes (Lewis et al.”
Beyond simple models of self-control to circuit-based accounts of adolescent behavior. (2015, background): “Across these studies the magnitude of brain activity to expressions of potential threat (negative facial faces) appears to be higher in adolescents than in adults (Baird et al. 1999, Guyer et al. 2008, Monk et al. 2003).”