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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
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Amygdala hyperactivation to angry faces in intermittent explosive disorder.

Michael S McCloskey1, K Luan Phan2, Mike Angstadt3

  • 1Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

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Summary

Individuals with intermittent explosive disorder (IED) show increased amygdala reactivity to angry faces, linking brain function to aggression severity. This highlights a potential neural basis for threat processing in IED.

Keywords:
AggressionAmygdalaExplicit emotion information processingFacesIntermittent explosive disorderfMRI

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psychiatry
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Intermittent explosive disorder (IED) linked to amygdala hyperactivity and reduced orbital medial prefrontal cortex (OMPFC) activation during implicit emotion processing.
  • Previous fMRI studies suggest altered neural responses to angry faces in IED.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate neural substrates of explicit facial emotion encoding in individuals with IED.
  • To compare amygdala and OMPFC reactivity to emotional faces between IED and healthy controls (HC).
  • To explore the relationship between brain activation and aggression severity in IED.

Main Methods:

  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in 20 unmedicated IED subjects and 20 HC.
  • Participants viewed blocks of angry, happy, and neutral faces and identified emotional valence.
  • Amygdala and OMPFC reactivity were compared between groups and correlated with aggression.

Main Results:

  • The IED group showed significantly greater amygdala response to angry versus neutral faces compared to controls.
  • No significant differences in OMPFC activation were found between IED and HC groups for angry faces.
  • Amygdala activation to angry faces correlated positively with the number of prior aggressive acts across all subjects.

Conclusions:

  • Findings support prior evidence of amygdala dysfunction in IED during processing of social threat signals (angry faces).
  • This substantiates a link between amygdala hyperactivity to social threat cues and aggressive behavior in IED.
  • The study emphasizes the role of the amygdala in the neurobiology of aggression in IED.