Specific and common brain regions involved in the perception of faces and bodies and the representation of their emotional expressions

Abstract

Many studies provide support for the role of the fusiform gyrus in face recognition and its sensitivity to emotional expressions. Recently, category-specific representation was also observed for neutral human bodies in the middle temporal/middle occipital gyrus (extrastriate body area) but it is not clear whether this area is also sensitive to emotional bodily expressions. Besides these areas, other regions that process the affective information carried by the face and the body may be common and/or specific to the face or the body. To clarify these issues we performed a systematic comparison of how the whole brain processes faces and bodies and how their affective information is represented. Participants categorized emotional facial and bodily expressions while brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our results show that, first, the amygdala and the fusiform gyrus are sensitive to recognition of facial and bodily fear signals. Secondly, the extrastriate body area–area V5/MT is specifically involved in processing bodies without being sensitive to the emotion displayed. Thirdly, other important areas such as the superior temporal sulcus, the parietal lobe and subcortical structures represent selectively facial and bodily expressions. Finally, some face/body differences in activation are a function of the emotion expressed.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to I. Toni for advice on the design of the study, M. Barth for advice on the scanning parameters, P. Gaalman, R. Scheeringa and R. B. Mars for technical assistance, H. K. M. Meeren for assistance with the stimulus presentation programming, S. van der Goor and R. A. Otte for their assistance with the stimulus preparation and with the validation of the stimuli, S. Pichon for advice on the fMRI analysis, and R. Righart, J. Van den Stock and B. M. C. Stienen for comments on the manuscript. The authors were partly supported by Human Frontier Science Program HFSP-RGP0054/2004-C.