Functional atlas of emotional faces processing: a voxel-based meta-analysis of 105 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.

By Paolo Fusar-Poli, A. Placentino, Francesco Carletti, P. Landi, P. Allen, S. Surguladze, F. Benedetti, Marta Abbamonte, R. Gasparotti, F. Barale and 3 more. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, 2009

1,447 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BACKGROUND Most of our social interactions involve perception of emotional information from the faces of other people. Furthermore, such emotional processes are thought to be aberrant in a range of clinical disorders, including psychosis and depression. However, the exact neurofunctional maps underlying emotional facial processing are not well defined. METHODS Two independent researchers conducted separate comprehensive PubMed (1990 to May 2008) searches to find all functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies using a variant of the emotional faces paradigm in healthy participants. The search terms were: "fMRI AND happy faces," "fMRI AND sad faces," "fMRI AND fearful faces," "fMRI AND angry faces," "fMRI AND disgusted faces" and "fMRI AND neutral faces." We extracted spatial coordinates and inserted them in an electronic database. We performed activation likelihood estimation analysis for voxel-based meta-analyses. RESULTS Of the originally identified studies, 105 met our inclusion criteria. The overall database consisted of 1785 brain coordinates that yielded an overall sample of 1600 healthy participants. Quantitative voxel-based meta-analysis of brain activation provided neurofunctional maps for 1) main effect of human faces; 2) main effect of emotional valence; and 3) modulatory effect of age, sex, explicit versus implicit processing and magnetic field strength. Processing of emotional faces was associated with increased activation in a number of visual, limbic, temporoparietal and prefrontal areas; the putamen; and the cerebellum. Happy, fearful and sad faces specifically activated the amygdala, whereas angry or disgusted faces had no effect on this brain region. Furthermore, amygdala sensitivity was greater for fearful than for happy or sad faces. Insular activation was selectively reported during processing of disgusted and angry faces. However, insular sensitivity was greater for disgusted than for angry faces. Conversely, neural response in the visual cortex and cerebellum was observable across all emotional conditions. LIMITATIONS Although the activation likelihood estimation approach is currently one of the most powerful and reliable meta-analytical methods in neuroimaging research, it is insensitive to effect sizes. CONCLUSION Our study has detailed neurofunctional maps to use as normative references in future fMRI studies of emotional facial processing in psychiatric populations. We found selective differences between neural networks underlying the basic emotions in limbic and insular brain regions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85b73447455cfe511e3df3b1befa93fedd9ed46a

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Citations in the corpus

Childhood Adversity and Neural Development: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “…and the mobilization of defensive responses to external stimuli (LeDoux 2003, 2012), although it is well established that the amygdala responds not only to threatening cues but also to a wide variety of stimuli that have motivational salience (Costafreda et al. 2008, Fusar-Poli et al. 2009).”
The neuroscience of empathy (2018, result): “The amygdala is most responsive to expressions of fear and the anterior insula to disgust [25], in keeping with findings from electrical stimulation studies that implicate regions within these structures in the experiences of fear and disgust, respectively [26–28].”
A new meta-analytic method for neuroimaging studies that combines reported peak coordinates and statistical parametric maps (2012, result): “Results from the pooled analysis were fully consistent with previous literature on the neural networks involved in fearful faces perception [9,18].”
The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review (2012, background): “In fact, regions of visual cortex were some of the most frequent to appear in our meta-analytic findings (replicating several recent meta-analyses; e.g., Fusar-Poli et al. 2009; Kober et al. 2008; Vytal & Hamann 2010).”
The neuroaesthetics of music. (2013, methodology): “A contrast between sad music and happy music indicated recruitment of the caudate nucleus, responsible for the preparation of the chill response according to Salimpoor, Benovoy, Larcher, Dagher, and Zatorre (2011), and of the left thalamus, associated in many previous studies with processing of sad ”
RETHINKING THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN (2012, neutral): “…for much research on the neural basis of emotional functions in the human brain—a recent review uncovered 551 studies between 1990 and 2008 that used Ekman’s basic emotions faces or variants of these to study functional activity related to emotion in the human brain (see Fusar-Poli et al., 2009).”
Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. (2014, background): “…question, given that partially overlapping prefrontal regions have been shown in prior work to support emotion generation, perception, experience, and regulation (Kober et al. 2008; Fusar-Poli et al. 2009; Ochsner et al. 2009; Vytal and Hamann 2010; Gross and Barrett 2011; Lindquist et al. 2012).”
Anatomo-functional basis of emotional and motor resonance elicited by facial expressions (2024, unknown): “53 Similar to the case of the ACC, the reactivity of the AI during the observation of positive and negative expressions is also in line with many neuroimaging 6,48,58-60 and intracranial 61 investigations.”