Dataset Information

Looking at the face and seeing the whole body. Neural basis of combined face and body expressions.

ABSTRACT: In the natural world, faces are not isolated objects but are rather encountered in the context of the whole body. Previous work has studied the perception of combined faces and bodies using behavioural and electrophysiological measurements, but the neural correlates of emotional face-body perception still remain unexplored. Here, we combined happy and fearful faces and bodies to investigate the influence of body expressions on the neural processing of the face, the effect of emotional ambiguity between the two and the role of the amygdala in this process. Our functional magnetic resonance imaging analyses showed that the activity in motor, prefrontal and visual areas increases when facial expressions are presented together with bodies rather than in isolation, consistent with the notion that seeing body expressions triggers both emotional and action-related processes. In contrast, psychophysiological interaction analyses revealed that amygdala modulatory activity increases after the presentation of isolated faces when compared to combined faces and bodies. Furthermore, a facial expression combined with a congruent body enhanced both cortical activity and amygdala functional connectivity when compared to an incongruent face-body compound. Finally, the results showed that emotional body postures influence the processing of facial expressions, especially when the emotion conveyed by the body implies danger.

SUBMITTER: Poyo Solanas M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5793719 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Looking at the face and seeing the whole body. Neural basis of combined face and body expressions.

Poyo Solanas Marta M Zhan Minye M Vaessen Maarten M Hortensius Ruud R Engelen Tahnée T de Gelder Beatrice B

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20180101 1

In the natural world, faces are not isolated objects but are rather encountered in the context of the whole body. Previous work has studied the perception of combined faces and bodies using behavioural and electrophysiological measurements, but the neural correlates of emotional face-body perception still remain unexplored. Here, we combined happy and fearful faces and bodies to investigate the influence of body expressions on the neural processing of the face, the effect of emotional ambiguity ...[more]

PMID: 29092076

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Project description:A central question in affective science and one that is relevant for its clinical applications is how emotions provided by different stimuli are experienced and represented in the brain. Following the traditional view emotional signals are recognized with the help of emotion concepts that are typically used in descriptions of mental states and emotional experiences, irrespective of the sensory modality. This perspective motivated the search for abstract representations of emotions in the brain, shared across variations in stimulus type (face, body, voice) and sensory origin (visual, auditory). On the other hand, emotion signals like for example an aggressive gesture, trigger rapid automatic behavioral responses and this may take place before or independently of full abstract representation of the emotion. This pleads in favor specific emotion signals that may trigger rapid adaptative behavior only by mobilizing modality and stimulus specific brain representations without relying on higher order abstract emotion categories. To test this hypothesis, we presented participants with naturalistic dynamic emotion expressions of the face, the whole body, or the voice in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study. To focus on automatic emotion processing and sidestep explicit concept-based emotion recognition, participants performed an unrelated target detection task presented in a different sensory modality than the stimulus. By using multivariate analyses to assess neural activity patterns in response to the different stimulus types, we reveal a stimulus category and modality specific brain organization of affective signals. Our findings are consistent with the notion that under ecological conditions emotion expressions of the face, body and voice may have different functional roles in triggering rapid adaptive behavior, even if when viewed from an abstract conceptual vantage point, they may all exemplify the same emotion. This has implications for a neuroethologically grounded emotion research program that should start from detailed behavioral observations of how face, body, and voice expressions function in naturalistic contexts.

Dataset Information

Looking at the face and seeing the whole body. Neural basis of combined face and body expressions.

Publications

Looking at the face and seeing the whole body. Neural basis of combined face and body expressions.

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