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Description: Most of our knowledge about human emotional memory comes from animal research, but it is unclear to what degree neural circuitries are comparable across species. Based on decades of animal work, the amygdala is often labelled the brain’s “fear center”. However, neuroimaging studies have yielded conflicting findings regarding the role of the amygdala in fear and extinction learning in humans, with many studies failing to show amygdala activation in response to learned threat. Rather than being regarded as falsifications, such null-findings are often treated as resulting from MRI-specific problems related to measuring deep brain structures. Here we test this assumption by combining data from three independent studies on fear acquisition (n=98) and extinction learning (n=79). In these experiments, two pictures of faces and two pictures of houses were repeatedly presented: one of each pair was followed by a mild electric shock (CS+), while the other one was never followed by a shock (CS-). Results revealed widespread activation in response to CS+ compared to CS- in the fear network, but not in the amygdala, which actually responded stronger to the CS-. Results were independent of spatial smoothing and participant characteristics such as trait anxiety and other measures of fear. In contrast, robust amygdala activation distinguished faces from houses, refuting the idea that poor signal could account for the absence of effects. Moving forward, we suggest that apart from imaging larger samples at higher spatial resolution, alternative statistical approaches may be employed to identify cross-species similarities in fear and extinction learning.