The functional correlates of face perception and recognition of emotional facial expressions as evidenced by fMRI

Abstract

Recognition and processing of emotional facial expression are crucial for social behavior and employ higher-order cognitive and visual working processes. In neuropsychiatric disorders, impaired emotion recognition most frequently concerned three specific emotions, i.e., anger, fear, and disgust. As incorrect processing of (neutral) facial stimuli per se might also underlie deficits in the recognition of emotional facial expressions, we aimed to assess all these aspects in one experiment. We therefore report here a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm for parallel assessment of the neural correlates of both the recognition of neutral faces and the three clinically most relevant emotions for future use in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. FMRI analyses were expanded through comparisons of the emotional conditions with each other. The differential insights resulting from these two analyses strategies are compared and discussed. 30 healthy participants (21 F/9 M; age 36.3±14.3, 17–66years) underwent fMRI and behavioral testing for non-emotional and emotional face recognition. Recognition of neutral faces elicited activation in the fusiform gyri. Processing angry faces led to activation in left middle and superior frontal gyri and the anterior cingulate cortex. There was considerable heterogeneity regarding the fear versus neutral contrast, resulting in null effects for this contrast. Upon recognition of disgust, activation was noted in bilateral occipital, in the fronto-orbital cortex and in the insula. Analyzing contrasts between emotional conditions showed similar results (to those of contrasting with reference conditions) for separated emotional network patterns. We demonstrate here that our paradigm reproduces single aspects of separate previous studies across a cohort of healthy subjects, irrespective of age. Our approach might prove useful in future studies of patients with neurologic disorders with potential effect on emotion recognition.