Distributed and interactive brain mechanisms during emotion face perception: evidence from functional neuroimaging.

By Patrik Vuilleumier, Gilles Pourtois. Neuropsychologia, 2007

1,187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Brain imaging studies in humans have shown that face processing in several areas is modulated by the affective significance of faces, particularly with fearful expressions, but also with other social signals such gaze direction. Here we review haemodynamic and electrical neuroimaging results indicating that activity in the face-selective fusiform cortex may be enhanced by emotional (fearful) expressions, without explicit voluntary control, and presumably through direct feedback connections from the amygdala. fMRI studies show that these increased responses in fusiform cortex to fearful faces are abolished by amygdala damage in the ipsilateral hemisphere, despite preserved effects of voluntary attention on fusiform; whereas emotional increases can still arise despite deficits in attention or awareness following parietal damage, and appear relatively unaffected by pharmacological increases in cholinergic stimulation. Fear-related modulations of face processing driven by amygdala signals may implicate not only fusiform cortex, but also earlier visual areas in occipital cortex (e.g., V1) and other distant regions involved in social, cognitive, or somatic responses (e.g., superior temporal sulcus, cingulate, or parietal areas). In the temporal domain, evoked-potentials show a widespread time-course of emotional face perception, with some increases in the amplitude of responses recorded over both occipital and frontal regions for fearful relative to neutral faces (as well as in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, when using intracranial recordings), but with different latencies post-stimulus onset. Early emotional responses may arise around 120ms, prior to a full visual categorization stage indexed by the face-selective N170 component, possibly reflecting rapid emotion processing based on crude visual cues in faces. Other electrical components arise at later latencies and involve more sustained activities, probably generated in associative or supramodal brain areas, and resulting in part from the modulatory signals received from amygdala. Altogether, these fMRI and ERP results demonstrate that emotion face perception is a complex process that cannot be related to a single neural event taking place in a single brain regions, but rather implicates an interactive network with distributed activity in time and space. Moreover, although traditional models in cognitive neuropsychology have often considered that facial expression and facial identity are processed along two separate pathways, evidence from fMRI and ERPs suggests instead that emotional processing can strongly affect brain systems responsible for face recognition and memory. The functional implications of these interactions remain to be fully explored, but might play an important role in the normal development of face processing skills and in some neuropsychiatric disorders.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c41fd5148e644c6c4ff8809a310d7693c7135cc

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

A meta-analytic review of emotion recognition and aging: implications for neuropsychological models of aging. (2008, background): “Moreover, there is not a single neural event in a single brain region, but different neural circuits being activated at different times as processing of an emotion stimulus takes place over time (Haxby et al., 2000; Vuilleumier and Pourtois, 2007).”
Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces (2009, background): “…faces occurs around 170 ms after stimulus onset, as indexed by a modulation of the N170 or M170 peak of the face-selective evoked-response potential (although some studies have failed to show such emotional modulation of the face-selective ERP; for reviews, see Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007).”
Sensitivity to genuine versus posed emotion specified in facial displays (2010, background): “Furthermore, evidence from imaging studies suggests at least partially dissociable neural networks are recruited in response to the different basic emotions (Loughead, Gur, Elliott, & Gur, 2008 ; Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007 ).”
Neuroimaging Support for Discrete Neural Correlates of Basic Emotions: A Voxel-based Meta-analysis (2010, background): “…et al. (2008) fMRI 8m, 8f 21.5 Mood induction V (Sentences) H Thielscher and Pessoa (2007) fMRI 10m, 15f 23 Viewing facial expressions V (Faces) F D Vuilleumier and Pourtois (2007) fMRI 12mix N/A Viewing facial expressions V (Faces) F Wang, McCarthy, Song, and LaBar (2005) fMRI 5m, 7f 25.9 Visual…”
Three Stages of Facial Expression Processing: ERP Study with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (2009, background): “Vuilleumier and Pourtois (2007) have thus suggested that there may be a rapid extraction of information related to emotion or salience that occurs before more fine-grained perceptual processes are complete.”
The Neurocircuitry of Fear, Stress, and Anxiety Disorders (2011, background): “Responses in the amygdala are readily elicited by photographs of facial expressions, especially those of fear (Breiter et al, 1996a; Davis and Whalen, 2001; Fitzgerald et al, 2006; Morris et al, 1996; Vuilleumier and Pourtois, 2007; Whalen et al, 2001), even when presented below conscious awareness ”
Emotional facial expressions evoke faster orienting responses, but weaker emotional responses at neural and behavioural levels compared to scenes: A simultaneous EEG and facial EMG study (2016, neutral): “Hence, emotion categoryspecific modulation of the N170 component may be reflecting these regional variations rather than motivational emotional significance of the stimuli (Vuilleumier and Pourtois, 2007).”
Social cognition in humans. (2007, neutral): “For example, facial expression and body posture tell us what someone may be feeling [ 2 ].”
The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development. (2009, positive): “In addition, the view is consistent with an integrative model including other aspects of face processing such as expression [ 33 ] and attractiveness [34], and which is based on the detection and evaluation of reward value and reward intensity.”
Functional atlas of emotional faces processing: a voxel-based meta-analysis of 105 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. (2009, positive): “These findings confirm that processing emotion from facial expressions draws on diverse psychological processes implemented in a large array of neural structures.(26) Although the exact functional interplay between these areas is not clear, some authors suggest that early perceptual processing of fa”