Scanning was performed on a Siemens whole body 3T system using a quadrature head coil; 35–41 contiguous coronal slices were acquired from each subject to ensure whole brain coverage. Slices were 5 mm thick, with a 0 mm skip, and images were collected every 3 seconds (TR=3000) using a single shot, gradient pulse echo sequence (TE=30 ms, flip angle =90, 50 images per slice). Each subject completed two masked facial affect tasks conducted as separate scanning runs (anger, happy). The presentation order of tasks was counterbalanced, and subjects were unaware of the backward masking nature of the paradigm. In order to ensure that subjects remained engaged, focused and attentive to the task, subjects were told that they would see a series of briefly presented photographs of faces and be required to make a gender discrimination for each face by pressing a small hand held key pad.
