HUMAN AMYGDALA ACTIVATION DETECTED WITH ECHO-PLANAR FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC-RESONANCE-IMAGING

ECHO-PLANAR functional magnetic resonance imaging (EP-fMRI) was used t o study the activity of the amygdalae while three normal female subjec ts viewed alternating blocks of affectively neutral and affectively ne gative still pictures. Bilateral activation in the amygdala that was s ignificantly correlated with the changing valence of the visual stimul i was found in all three subjects. These findings are consistent with the large corpus of data from non-human studies suggesting that the am ygdala is a key structure for extracting the affective significance fr om external stimuli. This is the first known report of phasic amygdala activation detected with EP-fMRI in normal human subjects responding to affective stimuli.