The focus of this literature review is on the activation patterns of the amygdala and its role in the evaluation of attentional threat, as well as the effects of the neuropeptide oxytocin on the amygdala. The amygdala plays an important role in human threat assessment. In both humans and primates, the identification of facial expressions and gaze direction is a necessary aspect of social behavior, and the amygdala plays an important role in this function (Boll, Gamer, Kalisch, & Buchel, 2011, p. 299). . From a medical perspective, studying the amygdala would help understand the neurological basis of many behavioral disorders such as borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. These studies make use of new techniques with a combination of functional MRI and eye-tracking based face perception tasks. More recent studies have involved more precise imaging to look at specific regions of the amygdala, rather than the amygdala as a whole. The amygdala is strongly influenced by fearful and angry faces, which stimulate feelings of threat. The amygdala also shows differential activation in different genders, thus having broad implications for tailoring medications for mood disorders across genders (Lischke et al., 2012, p. 1432). The activation of the amygdala and its role in the evaluation of attentional threat When considering the role of the amygdala in the evaluation of attentional threat, recent research attempts to address some questions: 1. Does the activation of the amygdala depend on the focus of attention? 2. What is the relationship between amygdala activation and gaze orientation? 3. How threat is assessed when looking at emotional faces with ambiguous gaze directions and focusing on a corresponding emotion...... middle of paper ......& Buchel, C. (2009). Amygdala activation predicts looking into fearful eyes. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(28), 9123-9126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1883-09.2009Gamer, M., Schmitz, A. K., Tittgemeyer, M., & Schilbach, L. (2013). The human amygdala guides reflexive orienting to facial features. Current Biology, 23(20), R917-R918. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.008Gamer, M., Zurowski, B., & Buchel, C. (2010). Different subregions of the amygdala mediate the valence- and attention-related effects of oxytocin in humans. PNAS, 107(20), 9400-9405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1000985107Lischke, A., Gamer, M., Berger, C., Grossmann, A., Hauenstein, K., Heinrichs, M., . . . Cupole, G. (2012). Oxytocin increases amygdala reactivity to threatening scenes in females. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 37(9), 1431-1438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2012.01.011