The amygdala response to images with impact

Abstract

Effective photojournalism provokes an emotional reaction and leaves a lasting impression upon the viewer. Striking and memorable images are often said to possess 'impact'. Within cognitive neuroscience memorable emotional images evoke a greater amygdala response. Research to date has focused on arousal as a causative factor, while the contribution of appraisal dimensions relating to salience of an item, goal relevance, or impact are yet to be addressed. We explored how differences in ratings of impact influenced amygdala activity to negative emotional images matched for valence, arousal and other factors. Increased amygdala activation was found to high impact when compared to neutral images, or high impact when compared to low impact images (matched for arousal). Our findings demonstrate that the amygdala response to emotional stimuli is not a function of arousal (or valence) alone and accord more with the proposal that the amygdala responds to the significance or relevance of an event.

Effects of emotion regulation strategy on brain responses to the valence and social content of visual scenes

“…It is also possible that the lack of effect of ESUP on the ratings of negative stimuli reflected their higher arousal values relative to the positive stimuli (see Section 2), although this difference had no such effect in the REAP condition. Because social stimuli typically tend to be judged as more arousing than nonsocial stimuli (Ewbank et al, 2009), we could not totally match emotion intensity between positive and negative scenes in order to obtain similar valence values for the more crucial comparisons of social and nonsocial content. Thus, social and nonsocial images were well matched on arousal (and control) judgments, and showed similar changes in subjective ratings across the different ER conditions.…”

“…The final distribution of pictures in these four categories as a function of emotional rating scores (PLN, INT, and CON) showed that NEG images had significantly lower pleasantness scores as compared to POS images [PLNNEG = 20.67 ± 6.02 and PLNPOS = 72.14 ± 10.19; F(1,59) = 3919.25, p < .001], but also higher intensity [INTNEG = 70.08 [ANOVA]). Note that the differences in intensity between negative and positive stimuli could not be avoided in order to match pairs of social and nonsocial scenes in both valence conditions, because social material is otherwise typically judged as much more intense than nonsocial material (Ewbank, Barnard, Croucher, Ramponi, & Calder, 2009). Finally, we also selected 40 neutral images from the IAPS database (20 including humans, 20 without humans) to be used in a baseline control condition (see below), with average valence ratings of 49.7 ± 1.7 (on the same scale of 1-100).…”

Generating value(s): Psychological value hierarchies reflect context-dependent sensitivity of the reward system

“…As the ventral striatum has been shown to encode the subjective value of rewards associated with a stimulus (Delgado, 2007), it should reflect differences in the valuation of the monetary rewards, which may drive more self-interested vs. altruistic decisions. Similar predictions may be made about the amygdala, which reflects the individual relevance or impact of a stimulus (Ewbank et al, 2009;Sander et al, 2003). (B) When participants are trying to overcome a habitual response during a GO/ NOGO task, neural activity to the NOGO stimuli reflects openness to change value.…”

“…It maintains information about the rewarding properties of action outcomes, so that actions associated with greater long-term reward value can be chosen more frequently . The amygdala, whose activity is tightly synchronized with striatal activity during reward processing (Popescu, Popa, & Pare, 2009), determines the relevance of a stimulus for the needs and goals of an organism (Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003;Sergerie, Chochol, & Armony, 2008), and shows stronger responses to stimuli that are perceived as having a subjective "impact" on the individual (Ewbank, Barnard, Croucher, Ramponi, & Calder, 2009).…”

Artificial companion: Building a impacting relation

“…Based on [11] we know that it is actually relevant to consider one unique measure qualifying emotions, which is "impact" instead of the traditional arousal, and valence measures.…”