Emotion circuits
Is amygdala activity to emotional faces stable enough to be a biomarker?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Although emotional faces reliably activated the amygdala and deactivated the subgenual cingulate on average, how strongly each individual responded was mostly not consistent from one scan to the next.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Test-retest reliability study: the same healthy adults did three emotional-face fMRI tasks twice per session on two days about two weeks apart; intraclass correlations computed per region.
- N
- N=29 · 29 participants analysed after exclusions from 35 recruited; per-task analyses used 27 (emotion identification), 29 (emotion matching) and 28 (gender classification).
- Population
- Healthy right-handed adults aged 18 to 40 with no psychiatric history, recruited in London
- Outcome
- Intraclass correlation (ICC) of BOLD responses in the left and right amygdala and subgenual anterior cingulate, with the right fusiform face area as a control
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Key findings
All three tasks produced the expected group-level amygdala activation and sgACC deactivation, but between-day reliability was poor in most cases, with seven of nine functional-region estimates well below the 0.4 threshold for moderate reliability. Reliability was also mostly poor within a single session, even between runs minutes apart. By contrast, the fusiform face area was at least moderately reliable in 13 of 15 tests and excellent in both block-design tasks. The only between-day result that was moderately reliable under both region-definition methods was the sgACC in the gender task, and even that never reached excellent reliability.
Methodology
Twenty-nine healthy young adults were scanned on two days roughly two weeks apart, doing three common face tasks twice each day: naming the emotion, matching emotional faces versus shapes, and judging the gender of emotional faces. The researchers extracted each person's response in the left and right amygdala and the subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC), using both group-peak and anatomical regions, and computed intraclass correlations between days and between runs. The right fusiform face area served as a positive control region.
Limitations
The sample was healthy young adults, so reliability in depressed patients, the group where biomarkers matter, is untested and might differ. Only three regions and three face tasks were examined, and a scanner at 1.5 T with restricted coverage was used, so other regions, tasks, field strengths or measures such as habituation might be more stable. Changes in mood or anxiety between sessions and habituation to the faces could partly explain the instability, and the study was powered only to detect a reliability of about 0.5.
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