期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2015
卷号：112
期号：5
页码：1583-1588
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1411315112
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificanceThe human voice is a major source for auditorily communicated social signals. The voice in general, and emotional cues embedded in vocalizations in particular, receive enhanced decoding in sensory cortical areas of the auditory system. This enhanced cortical decoding is assumed to be remotely driven by the amygdala, which responds to socially and emotionally meaningful stimuli. Here, we tested for the first time, to our knowledge, how damage to either the left or right amygdala impairs the cortical processing of human voices and vocal affect. Amygdala damage generally leads to reduced cortical processing of human voices in the hemisphere corresponding to the side of the amygdala damage, whereas only left amygdala damage impaired the cortical processing of vocal affect. We tested whether human amygdala lesions impair vocal processing in intact cortical networks. In two functional MRI experiments, patients with unilateral amygdala resection either listened to voices and nonvocal sounds or heard binaural vocalizations with attention directed toward or away from emotional information on one side. In experiment 1, all patients showed reduced activation to voices in the ipsilesional auditory cortex. In experiment 2, emotional voices evoked increased activity in both the auditory cortex and the intact amygdala for right-damaged patients, whereas no such effects were found for left-damaged amygdala patients. Furthermore, the left inferior frontal cortex was functionally connected with the intact amygdala in right-damaged patients, but only with homologous right frontal areas and not with the amygdala in left-damaged patients. Thus, unilateral amygdala damage leads to globally reduced ipsilesional cortical voice processing, but only left amygdala lesions are sufficient to suppress the enhanced auditory cortical processing of vocal emotions.
