Convergence of receptive and expressive emotional communication in the human amygdala: an fMRI-study of pleasant facial emotion

Introduction: Facial expressions play an important role in the coordination of everyday social behaviour. Social interaction thereby depends on a person's ability both to send and receive emotional signals which can be selectively impaired for distinct emotions as we have previously shown for asymptomatic Huntington's gene carriers and deep brain stimulated Parkinsons's disease patients [1, 2]. The amygdala has emerged as a key structure in receptive processing of mainly negative emotions. However, its role in both, appraisal and expression of positive facial emotion remains unclear. We hypothesized that activat…