Authors:RalphAdolphs,DanielTranel&AntonioR.Damasio
Published in Nature
This article discusses the role of the amygdala in social judgment, specifically in judging others based on their trustworthiness and approachability. Subjects were asked to rate pictures of people based on these two qualities. Participants with lesions in the amygdala rated the negative faces more positively than the controls.
In addition, the researchers also wanted to test how the participants judged people based on verbal descriptions without looking at a picture. The brain damaged patients made normal judgments, meaning that lesion patients’ visual processing is affected. This suggests that people with damaged amygdalas have a problem retrieving information from past experiences, which would be triggered by a visual stimulus.
It is interesting that the amygdala is involved in visual processing of emotional cues as well as in fear. It makes sense that people with damaged amygdalas would not pick up on negative faces as easily because displays of fear and negativity are somewhat similar. Is there a different part of the brain that would cause brain-damaged patients to have different judgments to verbal descriptions of people?
The amygdala is a very interesting region of the brain, and I find that it is all to often STRICTLY associated with emotion. As you've pointed out here, the amygdala serves several functions that are not necessarily discussed enough, like social judgement. For this particular experiment, I think a follow-up experiment that ALSO tests for amygdala response to various voice would be interesting and highly relevant.
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