Neural Substrates for Explicit Recognition of Dynamic Facial Expression by fMRI / 中国心理卫生杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective: To explore neural correlates for the recognition of facial expression videos using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging.Methods:Thirteen right-handed healthy Chinese women underwent blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) fMRI voluntarily while recognizing happy, sad, neutral emotional faces and fixation cross videos.Results:In comparison with fixation cross, recognition of neutral faces activated the left middle frontal gyrus, the bilateral precentral gyrus, the right amygdala, the left parahippocampal gyrus, the right postcentral gyrus and the left thalamus. In comparison of neutral faces recognition, the recognition of happy faces elicited increased activation in the right medial frontal gyrus, the right superior frontal gyrus, the middle frontal gyrus, the right anterior cingulated gyrus, the left subcallosal gyrus, the right superior occipital gyrus, the left middle occipital gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus; while the recognition of sad faces activated the left medial frontal gyrus, the right middle frontal gyrus, the left inferior temporal gyrus and the left superior temporal gyrus.Conclusion:This study indicates that the recognition of facial expression is mediated by a distributed cortical network, and the medial frontal gyrus may be involved in discriminating different affective information, while the superior temporal gyrus may play an important role in processing the dynamic characters of face.