A role for somatosensory cortices in the visual recognition of emotion as revealed by three-dimensional lesion mapping

Although lesion and functional imaging studies have broadly implicated the right hemisphere in the recognition of emotion, neither the underlying proc esses nor the precise anatomical correlates are well understood. We address ed these two issues in a quantitative study of 108 subjects with focal brai n lesions, using three different tasks that assessed the recognition and na ming of six basic emotions from facial expressions. Lesions were analyzed a s a function of task performance by coregistration in a common brain space, and statistical analyses of their joint volumetric density revealed specif ic 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 int ernally generating somatosensory representations that simulate how the othe r individual would feel when displaying a certain facial expression. Follow -up experiments revealed that conceptual knowledge and knowledge of the nam e of the emotion draw on neuroanatomically separable systems. Right somatos ensory-related cortices thus constitute an additional critical component th at functions together with structures such as the amygdala and right visual cortices in retrieving socially relevant information from faces.