How the brain responds to seeing fear behavior in the real world

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event How the brain responds to seeing fear behavior in the real world Jan-Van Den-Stock1* and Beatrice De-Gelder2 1 Tilburg University, Netherlands 2 NYU, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, United States Recent studies have examined the role of surrounding contextual information on the processing and recognition of objects, as well as the respective neural mechanisms. There are only a few studies focussing on the mechanisms involved in contextual influence on perception of social stimuli. Although the processing of faces seems to have a ‘privileged’ status, recent data reports that the early components of the neural processing of faces are influenced by the emotional content of the contextual information. An object category that displays several behavioral and neurofunctional similarities with faces, comprises whole bodies. We used functional Magnet Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of perceiving emotional whole body expressions in either emotionally congruent or incongruent contexts. We presented fearful and neutral whole body expressions in a fearful, neutral or scrambled context, creating realistically compound stimuli. The stimuli were presented in a blocked design while blood oxygenation level depended brain scans were acquired (3 Tesla). Participants were required to perform an oddball detection task on the presentation of an inverted stimulus. The experiment consisted of four runs with each 31 block. In one block, eight stimuli were presented for 800ms with an interval of 350ms. In 10% of the blocks, an oddball stimulus was presented. Finally, a functional localiser for the perception of faces, bodies, houses and tools was performed. The results show that activity in brain areas that are associated with perception of bodies or perception of scenes, are influenced by the emotional information conveyed by the respective stimuli. Conference: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, Rhodes Island, Greece, 13 Sep - 18 Sep, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster presentations Citation: Den-Stock J and De-Gelder B (2009). How the brain responds to seeing fear behavior in the real world. Conference Abstract: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.333 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Jun 2009; Published Online: 15 Jun 2009. * Correspondence: Jan-Van Den-Stock, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands, jan.vandenstock@med.kuleuven.be Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Jan-Van Den-Stock Beatrice De-Gelder Google Jan-Van Den-Stock Beatrice De-Gelder Google Scholar Jan-Van Den-Stock Beatrice De-Gelder PubMed Jan-Van Den-Stock Beatrice De-Gelder Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.