Previous studies have shown that emotional stimuli can be processed through the amygdala without conscious awareness. The amygdala is also involved in processing animate and social information. However, it is unclear whether different categories of pictures (e.g., animals, objects) elicit different activity in the amygdale and other regions without conscious awareness. The objective of this study was to explore whether the factors of category, emotion and picture context modulate brain activation for unconscious processing. Pictures denoting different nonhuman animals and objects in negative and neutral emotional valences were presented using a sandwich-masking paradigm. Half of them were presented with human-related information in the contexts, and half were not. Our results showed significant interaction among category, emotion and context in the amygdala and subcortical regions. Specifically, negative animals elicited stronger activation in these regions than negative objects, especially with human contexts. In addition, there were different correlation patterns between the amygdala and cortical regions according to whether they included human context. There were limited activations in cortical category-related networks. These results suggest that the amygdala and subcortical regions dominantly process negative animals, and contextual information modulates their activities, making threatening stimuli that are most relevant to human survival preferentially processed without conscious awareness.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 July 2016.
All research outputs
#14,473,731
of 25,182,110 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
#3,862
of 7,638 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#146,214
of 307,249 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
#90
of 166 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,182,110 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 41st percentile – i.e., 41% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,638 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.9. This one is in the 48th percentile – i.e., 48% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 166 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 45th percentile – i.e., 45% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
