Brain regions involved in verbal or non-verbal aspects of facial emotion recognition

To depict the neural substrates for Facial emotion recognition and to deter mine whether their activation is confounded by a verbal factor, we studied eight normal volunteers with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Verbal and nonverbal sample stimuli were used in a facial emotion matching task and a gender matching task (control condition). Compared with the gend er tasks, the emotion tasks significantly activated the right veneral prefr ontal cortex, the right lingual cortex, and the left lateral fusiform corte x. irrespective of sample stimuli. The visual association cortices showed a significant interaction between the task and the material presented, as th e activation for verbal materials was higher than for non-verbal materials during the emotion matching tasks. By contrast, no significant interaction was found in the right ventral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest tha t the verbal factor has a different effect on the neural networks for facia l emotion processing. NeuroReport 11:2571-2576 (C) 2000 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.