Age‐related differences in the medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces as revealed by fMRI

Abstract

Age-related differences involved in the neural substrates of emotional face perception were investigated in young and old healthy volunteers. The subjects were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were judging the gender of faces with negative, positive, or neutral emotional valence. The results showed that both the predominant activation in young subjects and reduced activity in old subjects contributed to a significant age difference in the left amygdala during the perception of negative faces. Activity in the right parahippocampal gyrus during the perception of positive faces diminished with advancing age. Neural activity in the angular gyrus and lingual gyrus of the right hemisphere was reduced in the old subjects during the perception of positive faces. There was no region where old subjects had greater activity than young subjects during the task. In old subjects, the overall activity in the right hippocampus during the task correlated negatively with age, whereas the activity in the right parahippocampal gyrus correlated positively with neuropsychological performance. There was no significant correlation between subjects' characteristics and signal change in young subjects. These results indicate the age-associated vulnerability of the medial temporal lobe structures including the amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus during face perception. The dissociation with reduced activity in the left amygdala and the right parahippocampal gyrus may suggest that aging differentially affects neural responses to faces with negative or positive emotional valence. The parieto-occipital lobe, which has been found to be involved in face processing, also showed a functional decline associated with aging.

Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

“…(2007) have shown that brain reactivity to negative emotional input decreased linearly with age, while it remained stable for positive input. Finally, an age-related reduced reactivity of the amygdala has been described for negative facial expressions and pictures, but not for positive ones (e.g., Gunning-Dixon et al, 2003;Iidaka et al, 2002;Mather et al, 2004). It is therefore possible that the age-related changes in motivation towards positive input and the bias to positivity, which appear to be linked with changes in brain function, underlie the pattern of results reported here.…”

“…Converging evidence supports the link between this motivational shift and age-related changes in how we recognize and process emotional stimuli (GunningDixon et al, 2003;Iidaka et al, 2002;Jacques, Dolcos, & Cabeza, 2008;Kisley, Wood, & Burrows, 2007;Mather et al, 2004;Williams et al, 2006). For instance, Williams and colleagues (2006) analyzed the recognition of fearful, happy and neutral facial expressions from 12 to 79 years of age using behavioral, neurophysiological and neuroimaging methods.…”

Testosterone Increases Amygdala Reactivity in Middle-Aged Women to a Young Adulthood Level

“…While amygdala and fusiform gyrus activity decreases, prefrontal activity increases in healthy older men and women (460 years) in comparison to young adults (o30 years) (Iidaka et al, 2002;Gunning-Dixon et al, 2003;Mather et al, 2004;Tessitore et al, 2005). However, to our knowledge, amygdala reactivity during midlife has not been investigated previously.…”

Children's and adults’ neural bases of verbal and nonverbal ‘theory of mind’

“…Amygdala activity has been found in several ToM neuroimaging studies that emphasized socio-emotional facets of ToM such as reading social and emotional cues from others ( Baron-Cohen, et al, 1999b;Gallagher & Frith, 2004;Vollm et al, 2006). In addition, the amygdala is known to be active when subjects are exposed to emotional faces (Baron-Cohen et al, 1999b;Iidaka et al, 2002;Morris, deBonis, & Dolan, 2002;Morris et al, 1996). Thus, the greater activity in this area for the adult group may indicate that adults were more aware of emotional cues in the faces in the cartoon ToM task than children.…”