Stimulus-driven and strategic neural responses to fearful and happy facial expressions in humans

Abstract

The human amygdala responds selectively to consciously and unconsciously perceived facial expressions, particularly those that convey potential threat such as fear and anger. In many social situations, multiple faces with varying expressions confront observers yet little is known about the neural mechanisms involved in encoding several faces simultaneously. Here we used event-related fMRI to measure neural activity in pre-defined regions of interest as participants searched multi-face arrays for a designated target expression (fearful or happy). We conducted separate analyses to examine activations associated with each of the four multi-face arrays independent of target expression (stimulus-..