Cortical brain regions engaged by masked emotional faces in adolescents and adults: an fMRI study

Face-emotion processing has shown signs of developmental change during adolescence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used on 10 adolescents and 10 adults to contrast brain regions engaged by a masked emotional-face task (viewing a fixation cross and a series of masked happy and masked fearful faces), while blood oxygen level dependent signal was monitored by a 1.5-T MRI scanner. Brain regions differentially engaged in the 2 age groups were mapped by using statistical parametric mapping. Summed across groups, the contrast of masked face versus fixation-cross viewing generated activations in occipital-temporal regions previously activated in passive face-viewing tasks. Adolescents showed higher maxima for activations in posterior association cortex for 3 of the 4 statistical contrasts. Adolescents and adults differed in the degree to which posterior hemisphere brain areas were engaged by viewing masked facial displays of emotion.