An understanding of amygdala function must also address interactions with other regions, as distinct circuits likely serve discrete roles in emotion processing and may relate differentially to symptom domains. Amygdala activation and connectivity was investigated in healthy people, schizophrenia patients and family members. Several limbic, striatal, thalamic, and cortical regions have been identified as constituting a “social brain circuitry” (Park et al., 2011). In healthy people we observed increased amygdala functional connectivity with lateral orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula in response to threatening facial expressions (Satterthwaite et al., 2011) and abnormally high amygdala-orbitofrontal cortex /insula functional connectivity in schizophrenia in a facial recognition task with neutral faces (Satterthwaite et al., 2010). In contrast, ventral striatum and ventral pallidum preferentially respond to rewarding stimuli, and in healthy people we noted anticorrelated activity between amygdala and these regions during emotion identification (Satterthwaite et al., 2011). Ventromedial prefrontal cortex-amygdala interactions have been implicated in “top-down” modulation of negative emotions and in extinction or reversal of previous aversive associations (Leitman et al., 2011). Ventral prefrontal top-down modulation of facial emotion processing was reduced in
