A04: Implicit chemosensory threat signals as stimulators of amygdala hyperresponsiveness in AMD

We make use of threat-related chemosensory stimuli, namely body odor, acquired during aggressive behavior (boxing) and unconsciously perceived, to investigate heightened amygdala responses to threat stimuli in aggressive patients. Body odors have the major advantage of being directly projected into the amygdala, circumventing cortical preprocessing, thereby enabling the differentiation of mechanisms between bottom-up altered limbic processing and top-down modulated altered cognitive evaluation. We investigate the potential of such body odors to bias responses to ambiguous visual social cues towards threat and their effects during peripersonal space (PPS) violation where they may be especially relevant.