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Looking at happy and sad faces: an fMRI study.
Authors:
LAWRENCE, A.D., Chakrabarti, B. & CALDER, A.J.
Reference:
Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 26
Year of publication:
2004
CBU number:
5867
Abstract:
Neuropsychological and neuroimaging work has demonstrated that facial expressions of fear and disgust are processed by at least partial isolable neural systems (the amygdala and insula, respectively). By contrast, there are no reports to date of selective impairments in the recognition of two other ëaffect programí emotions, namely, happiness and sadness. Further, relative to fear and disgust, few imaging experiments have examined the neural correlates of happy and sad facial expression processing, and findings to date have been inconsistent. We, therefore, examined the neural systems activated when viewing facial expressions of happiness and sadness relative to neutral facial expressions using fMRI. BOLD contrast functional images were acquired using a 3T Bruker Medspec scanner in 15 healthy adults (7 female, mean age 22 years) whilst performing a gender decision task on images of individuals from the Ekman and Friesen Pictures of Facial Affect, displaying neutral, happy and sad facial expressions, using a block design. Comparing viewing of neutral facial expressions to low-level fixation revealed activation in the fusiform ëface areaí and occipital regions. Relative to neutral and sad faces, viewing happy faces resulted in activity in the midbrain, in the region of the ventral tegmental area (VTA). By contrast, viewing sad faces relative to happy and neutral expressions resulted in activity in medial prefrontal regions (MPFC). These regions (VTA, MPFC) have previously been associated with the experience of happiness and sadness, respectively. We discuss these results in relation to the potential signalling functions of these particular expressions.