The Role of the Amygdala in Facial Trustworthiness Processing: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of fMRI Studies

Sara Santos, Inês Almeida, Bárbara Oliveiros and Miguel Castelo-Branco

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 11, 1-28

Abstract: Background: Faces play a key role in signaling social cues such as signals of trustworthiness. Although several studies identify the amygdala as a core brain region in social cognition, quantitative approaches evaluating its role are scarce. Objectives: This review aimed to assess the role of the amygdala in the processing of facial trustworthiness, by analyzing its amplitude BOLD response polarity to untrustworthy versus trustworthy facial signals under fMRI tasks through a Meta-analysis of effect sizes (MA). Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analyses were also conducted. Data sources: Articles were retrieved from MEDLINE, ScienceDirect and Web-of-Science in January 2016. Following the PRISMA statement guidelines, a systematic review of original research articles in English language using the search string “(face OR facial) AND (trustworthiness OR trustworthy OR untrustworthy OR trustee) AND fMRI” was conducted. Study selection and data extraction: The MA concerned amygdala responses to facial trustworthiness for the contrast Untrustworthy vs. trustworthy faces, and included whole-brain and ROI studies. To prevent potential bias, results were considered even when at the single study level they did not survive correction for multiple comparisons or provided non-significant results. ALE considered whole-brain studies, using the same methodology to prevent bias. A summary of the methodological options (design and analysis) described in the articles was finally used to get further insight into the characteristics of the studies and to perform a subgroup analysis. Data were extracted by two authors and checked independently. Data synthesis: Twenty fMRI studies were considered for systematic review. An MA of effect sizes with 11 articles (12 studies) showed high heterogeneity between studies [Q(11) = 265.68, p

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167276 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 67276&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0167276

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0167276

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().