Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on November 7, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn188
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Emotional Context Enhances Auditory Novelty Processing in Superior Temporal Gyrus
1 Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron, 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, 2 Department of Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Bremen University, Grazer Strasse, 6, D-28359, Bremen, Germany, 3 Center for Advanced Imaging, Bremen University, Leobener Strasse, NW 2/C, D-28359, Bremen, Germany, 4 Department of Chemistry/Biology, Bremen University, Germany, 5 Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Lehmkuhlenbusch 4, 27753 Delmenhorst, Germany
Address correspondence to Prof. Carles Escera, PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Email: cescera{at}ub.edu.
Visualizing emotionally loaded pictures intensifies peripheral reflexes toward sudden auditory stimuli, suggesting that the emotional context may potentiate responses elicited by novel events in the acoustic environment. However, psychophysiological results have reported that attentional resources available to sounds become depleted, as attention allocation to emotional pictures increases. These findings have raised the challenging question of whether an emotional context actually enhances or attenuates auditory novelty processing at a central level in the brain. To solve this issue, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to first identify brain activations induced by novel sounds (NOV) when participants made a color decision on visual stimuli containing both negative (NEG) and neutral (NEU) facial expressions. We then measured modulation of these auditory responses by the emotional load of the task. Contrary to what was assumed, activation induced by NOV in superior temporal gyrus (STG) was enhanced when subjects responded to faces with a NEG emotional expression compared with NEU ones. Accordingly, NOV yielded stronger behavioral disruption on subjects’ performance in the NEG context. These results demonstrate that the emotional context modulates the excitability of auditory and possibly multimodal novelty cerebral regions, enhancing acoustic novelty processing in a potentially harming environment.
Key Words: attention • emotion • fMRI