To examine the relation between individual differences in the attentional bias to fearful faces and fearfulness or negative affectivity, correlation coefficients were calculated.
This effect is particularly strong for fearful faces because facial expressions of fear are especially good activators of the amygdala and/or because fearful faces demand attention to the eye region for successful emotion identification.
High-risk children made more errors recognizing fearful faces than controls and misattributed fear and angry facial affect as surprised.
Next, the experimenters ran the same tests using fearful faces in place of the angry ones.
While they were in the scanner, Pine showed them pictures of fearful faces.
Neuroimaging data showed that yohimbine increased amygdala activity in response to fearful faces in women, whereas it attenuated amygdala responsivity to fearful faces in men.
Compared to their controls, FEP patients only showed impaired recognition of fearful faces (p = .007).007
Behavioral results suggest that men and women detected fearful faces more quickly than happy ones.
Individuals with PDD-NOS and ASP were worse at recognizing fearful faces than were controls.
Moreover, yohimbine decreased orbitofrontal activity while viewing fearful faces in women.
The current study used low-frequency rTMS over the right PFC and indexed selective attention to fearful faces, hypothesizing a reduction in attention for fearful faces, i.e., a reversal of the latter effect.
