Facial expressions are one example of emotional behavior that illustrate the importance of emotions to both basic survival and social interaction. Basic facial responses to stimuli such as sweet and bitter taste are important for species fitness and governed by simple rules. Even at this basic level, facial responses have communicative value to other species members. During evolution simple facial responses were extended for use in more complex nonverbal communications; the responses are labile. The perception and production of facial expressions are cognitive processes and numerous subcortical and cortical areas contribute to these operations. We suggest that no specific emotion center exists over and above cognitive systems in the brain, and that emotion should not be divorced from cognition.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12812804
Facial expressions provide a window into the affective state, cognitive activity, temperament and perhaps, personality and psychopathology of an individual. With the increasing use of facial expressions in the clinical investigation of neuropsychiatric disorders affecting the perception and expression of emotions, affect recognition has proved more tractable for quantitative research while difficulties in quantification of expressions have emerged as major obstacles for progress in research in this area. As clinicians currently rely on purely manual and typically subjective methods of rating expressions, clinical research in schizophrenia and affective disorders has focused on the perception and recognition capabilities of the patients compared to healthy controls, and not so much on the way in which patients express emotions differently from healthy controls. The development of objective automated methods of expression quantification from 2D and 3D image data is the primary goal of this project. The specific goals of the project are:
https://www.cbica.upenn.edu/sbia/projects/facial_expresion.html
Faces convey a wealth of social signals. A dominant view in face-perception research has been that the recognition of facial identity and facial expression involves separable visual pathways at the functional and neural levels, and data from experimental, neuropsychological, functional imaging and cell-recording studies are commonly interpreted within this framework. However, the existing evidence supports this model less strongly than is often assumed. Alongside this two-pathway framework, other possible models of facial identity and expression recognition, including one that has emerged from principal component analysis techniques, should be considered.
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v6/n8/abs/nrn1724.html
Recent neuroscience research has investigated the mechanisms and neural bases of emotion processing. In these experimental studies, images of facial expressions pertaining to various specific emotions have often been used, because facial expressions are one of the most powerful means of communication between human beings.1 The importance of facial expressions in social interaction and social intelligence is widely recognized in anthropology and psychology.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3687050/
This study is part of an effort to map neural systems involved in the processing of emotion, and it focuses on the possible cortical components of the process of recognizing facial expressions. We hypothesized that the cortical systems most responsible for the recognition of emotional facial expressions would draw on discrete regions of right higher-order sensory cortices and that the recognition of specific emotions would depend on partially distinct system subsets of such cortical regions. We tested these hypotheses using lesion analysis in 37 subjects with focal brain damage. Subjects were asked to recognize facial expressions of six basic emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Data were analyzed with a novel technique, based on three-dimensional reconstruction of brain images, in which anatomical description of surface lesions and task performance scores were jointly mapped onto a standard brain-space. We found that all subjects recognized happy expressions normally but that some subjects were impaired in recognizing negative emotions, especially fear and sadness. The cortical surface regions that best correlated with impaired recognition of emotion were in the right inferior parietal cortex and in the right mesial anterior infracalcarine cortex. We did not find impairments in recognizing any emotion in subjects with lesions restricted to the left hemisphere. These data provide evidence for a neural system important to processing facial expressions of some emotions, involving discrete visual and somatosensory cortical sectors in right hemisphere.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/16/23/7678.abstract
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