salience and both positive and negative valence (Zald, 2003), convergent evidence suggests that the amygdala plays a unique role in the perception and processing of threat-related signals (Fitzgerald et al., 2006; Phelps and LeDoux, 2005). Consistent with animal studies of fear conditioning (LeDoux, 2003), the amygdala responds to potentially threatening social signals, such as angry or fearful faces (Gur et al., 2002; Mattavelli et al., 2014). Thus, the role of the amygdala is not specific to emotion perception and it plays a more general role such as assigning salience to events. Furthermore, aspects of this complex structure serve diverse behavioral functions and connect differentially to striatal and sensory or motor systems. Below we will summarize findings related to schizophrenia, where deficits in facial emotion identification have been documented, to illustrate how such a domain can anchor an RDoC framed investigation.
