Negative content enhances stimulus‐specific cerebral activity during free viewing of pictures, faces, and words

Abstract

Negative visual stimuli have been found to elicit stronger brain activation than do neutral stimuli. Such emotion effects have been shown for pictures, faces, and words alike, but the literature suggests stimulus‐specific differences regarding locus and lateralization of the activity. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we directly compared brain responses to passively viewed negative and neutral pictures of complex scenes, faces, and words (nouns) in 43 healthy participants (21 males) varying in age and demographic background. Both negative pictures and faces activated the extrastriate visual cortices of both hemispheres more strongly than neutral ones, but effects were larger and extended more dorsally for pictures, whereas negative faces additionally activated the superior temporal sulci. Negative words differentially activated typical higher‐level language processing areas such as the left inferior frontal and angular gyrus. There were small emotion effects in the amygdala for faces and words, which were both lateralized to the left hemisphere. Although pictures elicited overall the strongest amygdala activity, amygdala response to negative pictures was not significantly stronger than to neutral ones. Across stimulus types, emotion effects converged in the left anterior insula. No gender effects were apparent, but age had a small, stimulus‐specific impact on emotion processing. Our study specifies similarities and differences in effects of negative emotional content on the processing of different types of stimuli, indicating that brain response to negative stimuli is specifically enhanced in areas involved in processing of the respective stimulus type in general and converges across stimuli in the left anterior insula.

Effects of left and right medial temporal lobe resections on hemodynamic correlates of negative and neutral scene processing

“…Healthy controls showed enhanced visual cortex activation by negative pictures even in the absence of differential amygdala activation, which is in line with results of a previous study using the same experimental paradigm in a different sample of healthy participants (Reisch et al, 2020). These findings argue against the widely held assumption that emotional modulation of visual cortices critically depends on reentrant feedback from the ipsilateral amygdala (Pourtois et al, 2013;Vuilleumier, 2005).…”

“…The contrast negative > neutral was additionally examined within each group with whole-brain one-sample t-tests and in regions of interest (ROIs) of the ventral visual cortex to specifically compare patterns of emotional modulation between the three groups. For the ROI analysis, two symmetrical functional ROIs in the ventral visual cortex were derived from an independent sample of 34 healthy participants, who underwent the same fMRI paradigm in the pilot phase of the present study (Reisch et al, 2020) In line with Edmiston et al (2013), whole-brain analyses were thresholded voxel-wise at p <.001 (uncorrected) and corrected for multiple comparisons using a topological false discovery rate (FDR) of q <0.05 as cluster-forming threshold. For analyses of amygdala activation, an arbitrary cluster threshold of k = 10 voxels was applied to account for the small volume of the amygdala.…”

“…Preferential processing of emotional and especially negative stimuli enhances evolutionary fitness by enabling adaptive behavior. On the neural level, this preferential processing is reflected by enhanced blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response to negative scenes in visual brain areas (Aldhafeeri et al, 2012 ; Lang et al, 1998 ; Reisch et al, 2020 ; Sabatinelli et al, 2005 ). A possible mechanism underlying emotional modulation of visual cortex is reentrant feedback originating in the amygdala (Vuilleumier, 2005 ), which receives subcortical (McFadyen et al, 2017 ; Méndez‐Bértolo et al, 2016 ) and cortical visual input (Kravitz et al, 2013 ) and projects back to the ventral visual processing stream (Amaral et al, 2003 ; Freese & Amaral, 2006 ).…”

Right medial temporal lobe structures particularly impact early stages of affective picture processing

“…ERPs elicited by fearful faces did not differ significantly from those elicited by neutral faces, whereas in our sample, resection patients had significantly larger LPP responses to negative than to neutral scenes. Complex scenes typically contain many more perceptual details than isolated faces and thereby provide a much richer context for emotion perception (Reisch, Wegrzyn, Woermann, Bien, & Kissler, 2020; Sabatinelli et al, 2011). This may facilitate compensation by multiple brain sources for temporal lobe lesions.…”

Comparison of Four fMRI Paradigms Probing Emotion Processing

“…The differences between these paradigms lie in the stimulus material used (e.g., printed words, pictures, melodies), the task posed to participants (e.g., passive viewing, matching, emotional Stroop or n-back) and the cognitive effort needed to fulfill the task (e.g., 0-back versus 2-back conditions, emotional judgements). Previous research has shown that the nature of the task and stimuli employed have a considerable impact on the effects [ 6 , 7 , 8 ] and that different tasks can trigger different aspects of emotion processing [ 9 ]. In a few instances, even tasks intended to represent the same concept appear to elicit different activation patterns: a study comparing amygdala activation in four different threat reactivity tasks found that amygdala activation did not correlate significantly across the tasks [ 10 ].…”