The role of the amygdala

The amygdala, characterised by its almond-shaped region in the brain, plays a crucial role in the regulation of emotions and memories. Understanding the neurobiology of facial expressions of emotions becomes essential in comprehending how appropriate responses are modulated in social settings. Accurately recognising and interpreting emotional information is integral to everyday human behaviour, decision-making, and social interactions. Research indicates that the right amygdala is responsible for encoding faces, while the left amygdala is involved in the retrieval of faces.

At an evolutionary level, humans have continuously been attuned to identifying threats and potential dangers. Even in the present day, humans are wired to discern whether the situations they encounter are safe or menacing, and the amygdala plays a pivotal role in this mechanism.

The amygdala is recognised to be activated during what is termed an automatic state. Fearful events, such as recognising angry or fearful faces, result in a lack of explicit judgment of facial expressions. In these situations, lower and more primitive parts of the brain, including the amygdala, are activated, while higher cognitive functions are temporarily suppressed.

However, the amygdala is not solely associated with threatening stimuli; it has also been linked to positive expressions. Several studies, building upon earlier research focused on fear, have explored whether the amygdala exhibits correlations in perceiving sad and happy expressions compared to neutral ones. Results consistently show activation in the amygdala region in response to sad and happy expressions, underscoring that the amygdala is engaged in both the perception of negative and positive facial emotions.