Journal
TRANSLATIONAL PSYCHIATRY
Volume 2, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/tp.2012.46
Keywords
basolateral amygdala; eye tracking; fear vigilance; fMRI; sMRI; urbach-wiethe disease
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Funding
- Hope For Depression Research Foundation (HDRF: RGA) [9-015]
- Utrecht University (High-Potential program)
- Netherlands Society of Scientific research (Brain and Cognition) [056-24-010]
- South African MRC/DST Professional Development Program
- University of Cape Town (Brain Behavior Initiative)
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Recent rodent research has shown that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) inhibits unconditioned, or innate, fear. It is, however, unknown whether the BLA acts in similar ways in humans. In a group of five subjects with a rare genetic syndrome, that is, Urbach-Wiethe disease (UWD), we used a combination of structural and functional neuroimaging, and established focal, bilateral BLA damage, while other amygdala sub-regions are functionally intact. We tested the translational hypothesis that these BLA-damaged UWD-subjects are hypervigilant to facial expressions of fear, which are prototypical innate threat cues in humans. Our data indeed repeatedly confirm fear hypervigilance in these UWD subjects. They show hypervigilant responses to unconsciously presented fearful faces in a modified Stroop task. They attend longer to the eyes of dynamically displayed fearful faces in an eye-tracked emotion recognition task, and in that task recognize facial fear significantly better than control subjects. These findings provide the first direct evidence in humans in support of an inhibitory function of the BLA on the brain's threat vigilance system, which has important implications for the understanding of the amygdala's role in the disorders of fear and anxiety. Translational Psychiatry (2012) 2, e115; doi:10.1038/tp.2012.46; published online 15 May 2012
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