IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nature/v393y1998i6684d10.1038_30982.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The human amygdala in social judgment

Author

Listed:
  • Ralph Adolphs

    (University of Iowa College of Medicine)

  • Daniel Tranel

    (University of Iowa College of Medicine)

  • Antonio R. Damasio

    (University of Iowa College of Medicine
    The Salk Institute for Biological Studies)

Abstract

Studies in animals have implicated the amygdala in emotional1,2,3, and social4,5,6, behaviours, especially those related to fear and aggression. Although lesion7,8,9,10, and functional imaging11,12,13,14, studies in humans have demonstrated the amygdala's participation in recognizing emotional facial expressions, its role in human social behaviour has remained unclear. We report here our investigation into the hypothesis that the human amygdala is required for accurate social judgments of other individuals on the basis of their facial appearance. We asked three subjects with complete bilateral amygdala damage to judge faces of unfamiliar people with respect to two attributes important in real-life social encounters: approachability and trustworthiness. All three subjects judged unfamiliar individuals to be more approachable and more trustworthy than did control subjects. The impairment was most striking for faces to which normal subjects assign the most negative ratings: unapproachable and untrustworthy looking individuals. Additional investigations revealed that the impairment does not extend to judging verbal descriptions of people. The amygdala appears to be an important component of the neural systems that help retrieve socially relevant knowledge on the basis of facial appearance.

Suggested Citation

  • Ralph Adolphs & Daniel Tranel & Antonio R. Damasio, 1998. "The human amygdala in social judgment," Nature, Nature, vol. 393(6684), pages 470-474, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:393:y:1998:i:6684:d:10.1038_30982
    DOI: 10.1038/30982
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/30982
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/30982?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fen Xu & Dingcheng Wu & Rie Toriyama & Fengling Ma & Shoji Itakura & Kang Lee, 2012. "Similarities and Differences in Chinese and Caucasian Adults' Use of Facial Cues for Trustworthiness Judgments," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(4), pages 1-9, April.
    2. Mattarozzi, Katia & Colonnello, Valentina & De Gioia, Francesco & Todorov, Alexander, 2017. "I care, even after the first impression: Facial appearance-based evaluations in healthcare context," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 68-72.
    3. Fatima Maria Felisberti & Louisa Pavey, 2010. "Contextual Modulation of Biases in Face Recognition," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(9), pages 1-9, September.
    4. Tamami Nakano & Takuto Yamamoto, 2022. "You trust a face like yours," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-6, December.
    5. Hsieh, Tien-Shih & Kim, Jeong-Bon & Wang, Ray R. & Wang, Zhihong, 2020. "Seeing is believing? Executives' facial trustworthiness, auditor tenure, and audit fees," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1).
    6. Sara Santos & Inês Almeida & Bárbara Oliveiros & Miguel Castelo-Branco, 2016. "The Role of the Amygdala in Facial Trustworthiness Processing: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of fMRI Studies," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(11), pages 1-28, November.
    7. Ronnie Bryan & Pietro Perona & Ralph Adolphs, 2012. "Perspective Distortion from Interpersonal Distance Is an Implicit Visual Cue for Social Judgments of Faces," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(9), pages 1-9, September.
    8. Katarina Gospic & Erik Mohlin & Peter Fransson & Predrag Petrovic & Magnus Johannesson & Martin Ingvar, 2011. "Limbic Justice—Amygdala Involvement in Immediate Rejection in the Ultimatum Game," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(5), pages 1-8, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:393:y:1998:i:6684:d:10.1038_30982. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.