Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2007 Dec;2(4):274-83. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsm023.
Emotionally expressive faces have been shown to modulate activation in visual cortex, including face-selective regions in ventral temporal lobe. Here, we tested whether emotionally expressive bodies similarly modulate activation in body-selective regions. We show that dynamic displays of bodies with various emotional expressions vs neutral bodies, produce significant activation in two distinct body-selective visual areas, the extrastriate body area and the fusiform body area. Multi-voxel pattern analysis showed that the strength of this emotional modulation was related, on a voxel-by-voxel basis, to the degree of body selectivity, while there was no relation with the degree of selectivity for faces. Across subjects, amygdala responses to emotional bodies positively correlated with the modulation of body-selective areas. Together, these results suggest that emotional cues from body movements produce topographically selective influences on category-specific populations of neurons in visual cortex, and these increases may implicate discrete modulatory projections from the amygdala.
情感表达的面部已被证明可以调节视觉皮层的激活，包括腹侧颞叶中的面部选择性区域。在这里，我们测试了情感表达的身体是否同样可以调节身体选择性区域的激活。我们表明，与中性身体相比，具有各种情感表达的动态身体显示会在两个不同的身体选择性视觉区域中产生显著的激活，即外纹状体身体区域和梭状回身体区域。多体素模式分析表明，这种情绪调节的强度在体素基础上与身体选择性的程度相关，而与面部选择性的程度无关。在受试者中，杏仁核对情绪身体的反应与身体选择性区域的调制呈正相关。总之，这些结果表明，来自身体运动的情感线索会对视觉皮层中特定类别神经元的群体产生具有地形选择性的影响，并且这些增加可能暗示来自杏仁核的离散调节投射。
