Is a neutral expression also a neutral stimulus? A study with functional magnetic resonance

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription AbstractAlthough neutral faces do not initially convey an explicit emotional message, it has been found that individuals tend to assign them an affective content. Moreover, previous research has shown that affective judgments are mediated by the task they have to perform. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 21 healthy participants, we focus this study on the cerebral activity patterns triggered by neutral and emotional faces in two different tasks (social or gender judgments). Results obtained, using conjunction analyses, indicated that viewing both emotional and neutral faces evokes activity in several similar brain areas indicating a common neural substrate. Moreover, neutral faces specifically elicit activation of cerebellum, frontal and temporal areas while emotional faces involve the cuneus, anterior cingulated gyrus, medial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal gyrus, precentral/postcentral gyrus and insula. The task selected was also found to influence brain activity, in that the social task recruited frontal areas while the gender task involved the posterior cingulated, inferior parietal lobule and middle temporal gyrus to a greater extent. Specifically, in the social task viewing neutral faces was associated with longer reaction times and increased activity of left dorsolateral frontal cortex compared with viewing facial expressions of emotions. In contrast, in the same task emotional expressions distinctively activated the left amygdale. The results are discussed taking into consideration the fact that, like other facial expressions, neutral expressions are usually assigned some emotional significance. However, neutral faces evoke a greater activation of circuits probably involved in more elaborate cognitive processing.

Genetically predicted complement component 4A expression: effects on memory function and middle temporal lobe activation

“…The right middle temporal gyrus plays an important role in facial recognition (Carvajal et al 2013), and is activated by both neutral and angry facial expressions (Fusar-Poli et al 2009;Dickie et al 2014), consistent with the view that healthy participants respond simi-larly to both neutral and angry faces at both a behav-ioural and neural level (Lee et al 2008;Ille et al 2011). Nevertheless, participants may interpret neutral faces differently, not only due to the fact that no overt anger is being displayed, but also due to the presenta-tion context -for example, neutral faces are sometimes interpreted more positively if immediately following negative faces and more negatively if following happy faces (Lee et al 2008).…”

Inhibition in the face of emotion: Characterization of the spatial‐temporal dynamics that facilitate automatic emotion regulation

“…The right fusiform is well known to have a key role in facial recognition (McCarthy et al, 1997; Allison, Puce, Spencer, & McCarthy, ; Puce, Allison, Asgari, Gore, & McCarthy, ). The lingual gyrus has also been reported to be more active when participants viewed emotional compared to neutral images (Kehoe, Toomey, Balsters, & Bokde, ), although neutral faces are not in fact neutral and are not a good baseline (Kouptsova, Leung, & Taylor, ; Carvajal et al, ). Our results confirm the early effects of implicitly presented emotional stimuli on neural processing in the ventral visual stream.…”

Towards a constructionist approach to emotions: verification of the three-dimensional model of affect with EEG-independent component analysis

“…The orbitofrontal areas are well known to be crucial for many emotional functions, including appraisal and assigning a motivational value to stimuli for both positive and negative emotions. These areas are also possibly linked with the experience of affective value of both concrete and abstract stimuli (O’Doherty et al 2003 ; Rolls and Grabenhorst 2008 ; Carvajal et al 2013 ). It has also been shown that distinct OFC regions can be associated with either positive or negative emotions (Kringelbach 2005 ).…”