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Published April 2008 | Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Fear, faces, and the human amygdala

Abstract

The amygdala's historical role in processing stimuli related to threat and fear is being modified to suggest a role that is broader and more abstract. Amygdala lesions impair the ability to seek out and make use of the eye region of faces, resulting in impaired fear perception. Other studies in rats and humans revive earlier proposals that the amygdala is important not only for fear perception as such, but also for detecting saliency and biological relevance. Debates about some features of this processing now suggest that while the amygdala can process fearful facial expressions in the absence of conscious perception, and while there is some degree of preattentive processing, this depends on the context and is not necessarily more rapid than cortical processing routes. A large current research effort extends the amygdala's putative role to a number of psychiatric illnesses.

Additional Information

© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. Published April 2008. Available online 12th August 2008. This paper was supported by grants from NIMH, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.

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August 22, 2023
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