Emotion processing and the amygdala: from a ‘low road’ to ‘many roads’ of evaluating biological significance

By Luiz Pessoa, Ralph Adolphs. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2010

1,723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A subcortical pathway through the superior colliculus and pulvinar to the amygdala is commonly assumed to mediate the non-conscious processing of affective visual stimuli. We review anatomical and physiological data that argue against the notion that such a pathway plays a prominent part in processing affective visual stimuli in humans. Instead, we propose that the primary role of the amygdala in visual processing, like that of the pulvinar, is to coordinate the function of cortical networks during evaluation of the biological significance of affective visual stimuli. Under this revised framework, the cortex has a more important role in emotion processing than is traditionally assumed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ece947b90441300fd60080d80a2bda9e9f183173

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

An Appraisal-Driven Componential Approach to the Emotional Brain (2018, positive): “In particular, we have argued that the amygdala is the core of the brain network involved in relevance detection (Sander et al., 2003; see also Pessoa, 2010; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010), with specific neural networks being certainly differentially involved in different types of affective relevance…”
Learning Race from Face: A Survey (2014, background): “hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated, sparsely coded representations, along the visual pathway [174], [226].”
Selective for Whole Faces in the Human Amygdala (2011, background): “Although there is ongoing debate regarding a possible subcortical route of visual input to the amygdala that might bypass visual cortices [29], both the long response latencies and WF selectivity of the neurons we report suggest a predominant input via cortical processing.”
A visual analytics approach to understanding cycling behaviour (2012, neutral): “The movie’s composer, Steven Price, identifies how this hybrid conception affected his scoring parameters: ‘Alfonso wanted me to try to express things that ordinarily would be sound in a musical way.”
Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. (2014, methodology): “Given the dense connectivity between the amygdala and the visual system, it may be that such stimuli are more likely to elicit amygdala responses than are nonvisual ones (Price 2003; Phelps and LeDoux 2005; LeDoux 2007; Pessoa and Adolphs 2010).”
Predicting Advertising success beyond Traditional Measures: New Insights from Neurophysiological Methods and Market Response Modeling (2015, background): “The pattern of activations found here is consistent with the presence of these two components: the amygdala represents affective processing (Pessoa and Adolphs 2010; Phelps 2004), and the dlPFC represents cognitive processing (Miller and Cohen 2001).”
The Development of Human Amygdala Functional Connectivity at Rest from 4 to 23 Years: a cross-sectional study (2014, neutral): “Lastly, the amygdala demonstrated a reversal in coupling valence across age with a right-lateralized region of insula, STS/G, and inferior parietal lobe (observedmore robustly in the primary global signal regression analyses), an areawhose connectivitywith the amygdala has been implicated broadly in”
A meta-analysis of neurofunctional imaging studies of emotion and cognition in major depression (2012, neutral): “Recent research has shown that emotion and cognition highly interact by accessing identical brain regions in broadly overlapping neural networks to guide behavior (Duncan and Barrett, 2007; Pessoa, 2008, 2010; Pessoa and Adolphs, 2010).”
The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review (2012, background): “Thus, visual processing takes place within a context that is defined by signals occurring in the amygdala (as well as the orbitofrontal cortex, pulvinar, and other regions), including those linked to affective significance (Pessoa & Adolphs 2010).”
Emotional Responses to Multisensory Environmental Stimuli (2016, methodology): “Accumulating neuroimaging research suggests that affective processing involves the interactions of large neural networks in complex, recursive multilevel processes (Brosch & Sander, 2013; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010).”