Explicit and Incidental Facial Expression Processing: An fMRI Study

By Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini, Samanta Pradelli, M. Serafini, Giuseppe Pagnoni, P. Baraldi, C. Porro, R. Nicoletti, Carlo Umità, P. Nichelli. NeuroImage, 2001

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Considerable evidence indicates that processing facial expression involves both subcortical (amygdala and basal ganglia) and cortical (occipito-temporal, orbitofrontal, and prefrontal cortex) structures. However, the specificity of these regions for single types of emotions and for the cognitive demands of expression processing, is still unclear. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the neural correlates of incidental and explicit processing of the emotional content of faces expressing either disgust or happiness. Subjects were examined while they were viewing neutral, disgusted, or happy faces. The incidental task required subjects to decide about face gender, the explicit task to decide about face expression. In the control task subjects were requested to detect a white square in a greyscale mosaic stimulus. Results showed that the left inferior frontal cortex and the bilateral occipito-temporal junction responded equally to all face conditions. Several cortical and subcortical regions were modulated by task type, and by facial expression. Right neostriatum and left amygdala were activated when subjects made explicit judgements of disgust, bilateral orbitofrontal cortex when they made judgement of happiness, and right frontal and insular cortex when they made judgements about any emotion.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9465b21fe9075804900b88f069f81f7cb0723fac

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Citations in the corpus

Is 2 + 2 = 4? Meta-analyses of brain areas needed for numbers and calculations (2011, background): “The insular cortices are located deep within the lateral fissure linking the temporal and frontal lobes and are known for their involvement in emotional processes (Britton et al., 2006; Calder et al., 2000; Gorno-Tempini et al., 2001; Heinzel et al., 2005; Paulus and Stein, 2006).”
The cognitive control of emotion. (2005, background): “On the other hand, studies have shown amygdala activity to be invariant with respect to attention to emotional features when participants judged the gender of fearful faces rather than judging aspects of simultaneously presented houses [19,25], judged the gender as compared with expression of happy ”
A systems approach to appraisal mechanisms in emotion (2005, unknown): “Moreover, it was shown that the processing of negative words (Isenberg et al., 1999) and faces (e.g. Gorno-Tempini et al., 2001) that are in the focus of attention, but incidentally processed, activates the amygdala.”
The neural architecture of emotion regulation (2007, background): “…houses (Anderson et al., 2003; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001); judged the gender as compared to expression of happy and disgust (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2001) or happy, sad, disgusted, and fearful faces (Winston, O’Doherty, & Dolan, 2003); judged either the age or…”
Increased amygdala and insula activation during emotion processing in anxiety-prone subjects. (2007, background): “Insula activation is also thought to be involved in differential positive versus negative emotion processing (44) and in the making of judgments about emotions based on facial expression (45).”
Functional atlas of emotional faces processing: a voxel-based meta-analysis of 105 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. (2009, unknown): “3 24 13 27 Ekman Gorno-Tempini et al.(19) 1.”
Common and distinct neural responses during direct and incidental processing of multiple facial emotions (2003, background): “Recently, two imaging experiments tackled the question of task effects (Critchley et al., 2000a; Gorno-Tempini et al., 2001) although both were limited by blocked presentation of emotional stimuli.”
The Neurocircuitry of Fear, Stress, and Anxiety Disorders (2011, background): “Emotional facial expressions have also been associated with activation in the dACC, rACC, medial frontal gyrus, and insular cortex (Fitzgerald et al, 2006; Gorno-Tempini et al, 2001; Morris et al, 1996; Phillips et al, 1997, 2004; Sabatini et al, 2009; Sprengelmeyer et al, 1998).”
Dissociable Neural Pathways Are Involved in the Recognition of Emotion in Static and Dynamic Facial Expressions (2003, unknown): “The neural representations of perception for incidentally or implicitly processed expressions apparently differ from those related to explicitly processed expressions (Critchley et al., 2000b; Gorno-Tempini et al., 2001).”
Finally, faces find favor (2006, background): “Thus, although specific brain regions involved in the recognition of identity or emotion are fairly well established, much remains to be learned regarding similarities and differences in the overall patterns of neural activation for particular identities, expressions, social categories, and psycholo”
Mirror Neuron and Theory of Mind Mechanisms Involved in Face-to-Face Interactions: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Approach to Empathy (2007, background): “A number of neuroimaging experiments on the decoding of emotion from facial displays failed to reveal inferior frontal or other mirror neuron activation (cp. Adolphs, 2002 for a recent review; but see, for example, Gorno-Tempini et al., 2001; George et al., 1993).”