Fear vs Happy faces

Description: During FMRI scanning, participants completed a well validated gender discrimination task involving the rapid presentation of greyscale fearful and happy faces taken from the NimStim database (Tottenham et al., 2009). Nine 20 second blocks of baseline (fixation cross) were interleaved with 8 blocks of the emotional faces (again 20 seconds in duration, 4 blocks of fearful and four blocks of happy faces). Individual faces were presented for 100ms and the participant had to indicate, by button press, the gender of the face. Equal numbers of male and female faces were presented in each condition. Stimuli were presented on a personal computer using E-Prime (using version 2.10.242, Psychology Software Tools Inc., USA) and projected onto an opaque screen at the foot of the scanner bore, which subjects viewed using an angled mirror mounted above the head coil. Both accuracy and response time were recorded by E-Prime.