Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Face Versus Non-Face Context Influences Amygdala Responses To Masked Fearful Eye Whites, M. Justin Kim, Kimberly M. Solomon, Maital Neta, Caroline Davis, Jonathan A. Oler, Emily C. Mazzulla, Paul J. Whalen

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The structure of the mask stimulus is crucial in backward masking studies and we recently demonstrated such an effect when masking faces. Specifically, we showed that activity of the amygdala is increased to fearful facial expressions masked with neutral faces and decreased to fearful expressions masked with a pattern mask – but critically both masked conditions discriminated fearful expressions from happy expressions. Given this finding, we sought to test whether masked fearful eye whites would produce a similar profile of amygdala response in a face vs. non-face context. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning sessions, 30 participants viewed fearful or …