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A Role for Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Recognition of Emotion as Revealed by Three-Dimensional Lesion Mapping
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

A Role for Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Recognition of Emotion as Revealed by Three-Dimensional Lesion Mapping

Ralph Adolphs, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, Greg Cooper and Antonio R Damasio
The Journal of neuroscience, Vol.20(7), pp.2683-2690
04/01/2000
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.20-07-02683.2000
PMCID: PMC6772225
PMID: 10729349
url
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.20-07-02683.2000View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Although lesion and functional imaging studies have broadly implicated the right hemisphere in the recognition of emotion, neither the underlying processes nor the precise anatomical correlates are well understood. We addressed these two issues in a quantitative study of 108 subjects with focal brain lesions, using three different tasks that assessed the recognition and naming of six basic emotions from facial expressions. Lesions were analyzed as a function of task performance by coregistration in a common brain space, and statistical analyses of their joint volumetric density revealed specific regions in which damage was significantly associated with impairment. We show that recognizing emotions from visually presented facial expressions requires right somatosensory-related cortices. The findings are consistent with the idea that we recognize another individual's emotional state by internally generating somatosensory representations that simulate how the other individual would feel when displaying a certain facial expression. Follow-up experiments revealed that conceptual knowledge and knowledge of the name of the emotion draw on neuroanatomically separable systems. Right somatosensory-related cortices thus constitute an additional critical component that functions together with structures such as the amygdala and right visual cortices in retrieving socially relevant information from faces.
somatosensory empathy ARTICLE emotion social simulation somatic faces human

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