Neural substrates of facial emotion processing using fMRI

We identified human brain regions involved in the perception of sad, fright ened, happy. angry, and neutral facial expressions using functional magneti c resonance imaging (fMRI). Twenty-one healthy right-handed adult volunteer s (11 men, 10 women; aged 18-45; mean age 21.6 years) participated in four separate runs, one for each of the four emotions. Participants viewed block s of emotionally expressive faces alternating with blocks of neutral faces and scrambled images. In comparison with scrambled images, neutral faces ac tivated the fusiform gyri, the right lateral occipital gyrus, the right sup erior temporal sulcus, the inferior frontal gyri, and the amygdala/entorhin al cortex. In comparisons of emotional and neutral faces, we found that (1) emotional faces elicit increased activation in a subset of cortical region s involved in neutral face processing and in areas not activated by neutral faces; (2) differences in activation as a function of emotion category wer e most evident in the frontal lobes; (3) men showed a differential neural r esponse depending upon the emotion expressed but women did not. (C) 2001 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.