ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2017
Human Amygdala Tracks a Feature-Based Valence Signal Embedded within the Facial Expression of Surprise.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distinct temporal features of genuine and deliberate facial expressions of surprise.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Relationship of Susceptibility to Emotional Contagion with Automatic Emotion Processing and Emotional Competences.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Postnatal plasticity in the paralaminar nucleus of the pallial amygdala in juvenile swine brain.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Sensory encoding of emotion conveyed by the face and visual context.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Chronic Stress May Amplify Gender/Sex Differences in Amygdala Reactivity to Ambiguous Emotional Stimuli.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2025Article
- Event-Related Potentials to Facial Expressions Are Related to Stimulus-Level Perceived Arousal and Valence.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- A narrative review of the interconnection between pilot acute stress, startle, and surprise effects in the aviation context: Contribution of physiological measurements.Frontiers in neuroergonomics · 2023Review
- The shared signal hypothesis: Facial and bodily expressions of emotion mutually inform one another.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Interoception Primes Emotional Processing: Multimodal Evidence from Neurodegeneration.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Amygdalostriatal coupling underpins positive but not negative coloring of ambiguous affect.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Identifying the representational structure of affect using fMRI.Affective science · 2020Article
- Stimulus arousal drives amygdalar responses to emotional expressions across sensory modalities.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Immature excitatory neurons develop during adolescence in the human amygdala.Nature communications · 2019Article
- An Integrative Way for Studying Neural Basis of Basic Emotions With fMRI.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human amygdala function has been traditionally associated with processing the affective valence (negative vs positive) of an emotionally charged event, especially those that signal fear or threat. However, this account of human amygdala function can be explained by alternative views, which posit that the amygdala might be tuned to either (1) general emotional arousal (activation vs deactivation) or (2) specific emotion categories (fear vs happy). Delineating the pure effects of valence independent of arousal or emotion category is a challenging task, given that these variables naturally covary under many circumstances. To circumvent this issue and test the sensitivity of the human amygdala to valence values specifically, we measured the dimension of valence within the single facial expression category of surprise. Given the inherent valence ambiguity of this category, we show that surprised expression exemplars are attributed valence and arousal values that are uniquely and naturally uncorrelated. We then present fMRI data from both sexes, showing that the amygdala tracks these consensus valence values. Finally, we provide evidence that these valence values are linked to specific visual features of the mouth region, isolating the signal by which the amygdala detects this valence information.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.