The phrase
"fearful faces" means people who have expressions that show they are scared or afraid.
Full definition
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex responses to overtly presented
fearful faces in posttraumatic stress disorder
Images of
fearful faces produced normal levels of activation in the amygdala, which responds to fear, in both groups.
This hypothesis receives support from evidence that showing neurotic subjects images of
fearful faces triggers an exaggerated response in the amygdala, a brain region that has been linked to fearful emotion.
The «Anxious Drawings» that Johnson created in Somerset after Donald Trump's inauguration hark back to his «Untitled Anxious Audience» series, featuring multitudes of
fearful faces daubed in black soap and wax on ceramic tile panels, underscoring a persistent sense of collective disquiet.
Increased amygdala responses to sad but
not fearful faces in major depression: Relation to mood state and pharmacological treatment
The results of the social decision task yielded that individuals with high EI scores had left insular activation when
processing fearful faces.
Those shown
a fearful face were better at identifying whether thick stripes were vertical or slightly tilted and worse at identifying the orientation of thin stripes than those shown neutral faces (Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02354.x).
He then showed them test images of a spider paired with a happy face, and a flower paired with
a fearful face.
When Rakison accustomed a different set of babies to a spider and a happy face, or a flower and
a fearful face, the girls, like the boys, looked at both test images for the same length of time (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016 / j.evolhumbehav.2009.06.002).
Looking at
a fearful face, which activates the brain in a similar way to feeling fear, enhances sensitivity to visual contrast, but whether it improves vision across the board wasn't clear.
David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, carried out an initial training phase in which he showed 10 girls and 10 boys, who were all 11 months old, a picture of a spider together with
a fearful face.
They recorded the activity of 200 single amygdala neurons and determined how they responded while the patients viewed photographs of happy and
fearful faces.
(The team carefully manipulated some of the photos of
fearful faces, so that some of the subjects perceived them as being neutral.)
The team found a subset of cells that distinguish between what the patients thought to be happy and
fearful faces, even when they perceived ambiguous facial expressions incorrectly.
Working with TAOS director, Douglas Williamson, the group again measured amygdala reactivity to angry and
fearful faces as well as methylation of the serotonin transporter gene isolated from blood in 96 adolescents between 11 and 15 years old.
The group performed non-invasive brain imaging in the first 80 college - aged participants of the DNS, showing them pictures of angry or
fearful faces and watching the responses of a deep brain region called the amygdala, which helps shape our behavioral and biological responses to threat and stress.
The photograph of
a fearful face elicits a greater amount of blood flow and a higher signal during the scanning period than a neutral face photograph.»
«The interpretation of
another fearful face arouses the system of neural regions that respond to fear in the observer.»
In addition, when subjects were shown pictures of angry or
fearful faces, those with low MAO - A showed much greater activation of the amygdala, a region associated with anger and violent behavior.
Looking at
a fearful face, for instance, yields a bigger spike at the 170 - millisecond mark than looking at a neutral expression.
Images of
fearful faces...
With colleagues from Huntington Memorial Hospital, using electrodes placed deep in the brain for unrelated diagnostic purposes, investigators recorded electrical activity of individual neurons and found a subset that were «emotion - selective» because their responses distinguished between happy and
fearful faces.
However, only increased amygdala responses to
fearful faces were associated with successful clinical outcomes one week later.
So he and colleague Ahmad Hariri divided volunteers into two groups — one with the «short» variant and one without — and compared (using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which generates snapshots of the brain in action) how their amygdala responses differed when they were shown pictures of
fearful faces, a common method for triggering an amygdala response.
The faces and figures reflect my fear and
the fearful faces I saw.
Amygdala hypoactivity to
fearful faces in boys with conduct problems and callousunemotional traits
The reactivity of the amygala to negatively valenced stimuli (including angry or
fearful faces) is increased in psychiatric syndromes with elevated risk for reactive aggression (Blair, 2012), including intermittent explosive disorder (IED)(Coccaro et al., 2007), borderline personality disorder (Herpertz et al., 2001; Minzenberg et al., 2007; Silbersweig et al., 2007) and children with conduct problems (Sterzer et al., 2005).