A Role for Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Recognition of Emotion as Revealed by Three-Dimensional Lesion Mapping

By Ralph Adolphs, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, Gregory Cooper, Antonio R. Damasio. Journal of Neuroscience, 2000

1,060 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although lesion and functional imaging studies have broadly implicated the right hemisphere in the recognition of emotion, neither the underlying processes nor the precise anatomical correlates are well understood. We addressed these two issues in a quantitative study of 108 subjects with focal brain lesions, using three different tasks that assessed the recognition and naming of six basic emotions from facial expressions. Lesions were analyzed as a function of task performance by coregistration in a common brain space, and statistical analyses of their joint volumetric density revealed specific regions in which damage was significantly associated with impairment. We show that recognizing emotions from visually presented facial expressions requires right somatosensory-related cortices. The findings are consistent with the idea that we recognize another individual's emotional state by internally generating somatosensory representations that simulate how the other individual would feel when displaying a certain facial expression. Follow-up experiments revealed that conceptual knowledge and knowledge of the name of the emotion draw on neuroanatomically separable systems. Right somatosensory-related cortices thus constitute an additional critical component that functions together with structures such as the amygdala and right visual cortices in retrieving socially relevant information from faces.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fa8872c9a84886e49f9d10a95ee86d45f13f0ae

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Citations in the corpus

Dissociable Neural Pathways Are Involved in the Recognition of Emotion in Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions (2003, positive): “While he neural substrates of emotion perception in static facial xpressions appear to be at least somewhat emotion-specific, he somatosensory cortex may have a more global role in the bility to comprehend the emotional significance of static acial expressions (Adolphs et al., 2000).”
The manifold nature of interpersonal relations: the quest for a common mechanism. (2003, background): “The strict coupling between affect and sensorimotor integration is highlighted by a recent study by Adolphs et al. (2000), where over 100 brain-damaged patients were reviewed.”
Common and distinct neural responses during direct and incidental processing of multiple facial emotions (2003, background): “Activations in these regions accord with the proposal that recognition of emotion involves simulation of the emotional display of a conspecific (Adolphs et al., 2000).”
A Selective Impairment in the Processing of Sad and Fearful Expressions in Children with Psychopathic Tendencies (2001, background): “In particular, lesions that include right somotosensory cortex disrupt the ability to recognise facial expressions ( Adolphs, Damasio, Cooper, & Damasio, 2000 ).”
Affective Judgments of Faces Modulate Early Activity (∼160 ms) within the Fusiform Gyri (2002, background): “Specifically, right supramarginal lesions led to deficits in recognizing, labeling, and building conceptual knowledge about facial expressions (Adolphs et al., 2000).”
The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love (2004, neutral): “The amygdala is reliably activated in neuroimaging studies involving negative emotions, aggression and fear (Aggleton, 2000; Breiter et al., 1996; Morris et al., 1996), and lesion studies show its involvement in social and emotional judgment (Adolphs et al., 1998).”
Functional imaging of face and hand imitation: towards a motor theory of empathy (2004, background): “Patients with damage to the right hemisphere are impaired in the recognition of a range of basic emotional expressions (Adolphs et al., 1996, 2000; Kucharska-Pietura et al., 2003).”
The functional architecture of human empathy. (2004, background): “The discovery that the somatosensory cortex is involved in the recognition of emotions provided the first direct evidence in favor of such an unconscious simulation process (Adolphs et al., 2000).”
Reintegrating the Study of Accuracy Into Social Cognition Research (2011, background): “Similarly, such a researcher may pay more attention to data demonstrating that damage to the ESS impairs emotion perception (Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, Cooper, & Damasio, 2000 ; Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger, Goldsher, & Aharon-Peretz, 2005 ) than to similar lesion data suggesting that the MSAS is n”