Dispositional fear, negative affectivity, and neuroimaging response to visually suppressed emotional faces.

ABSTRACT: "Invisible" stimulus paradigms provide a method for investigating basic affective processing in clinical and non-clinical populations. Neuroimaging studies utilizing continuous flash suppression (CFS) have shown increased amygdala response to invisible fearful versus neutral faces. The current study used CFS in conjunction with functional MRI to test for differences in brain reactivity to visible and invisible emotional faces in relation to two distinct trait dimensions relevant to psychopathology: negative affectivity (NA) and fearfulness. Subjects consisted of college students (N=31) assessed for fear/fearlessness along with dispositional NA. The main brain regions of interest included the fusiform face area (FFA), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and amygdala. Higher NA, but not trait fe

SUBMITTER: Vizueta N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3195869 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature