Ghent University, Department of Experimental Psychology and Clinical Experimental Psychology, 9000 Gent, Belgium.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2011 Jun;6(3):368-74. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq044. Epub 2010 May 26.
Facial expressions can trigger emotions: when we smile we feel happy, when we frown we feel sad. However, the mimicry literature also shows that we feel happy when our interaction partner behaves the way we do. Thus what happens if we express our sadness and we perceive somebody who is imitating us? In the current study, participants were presented with either happy or sad faces, while expressing one of these emotions themselves. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure neural responses on trials where the observed emotion was either congruent or incongruent with the expressed emotion. Our results indicate that being in a congruent emotional state, irrespective of the emotion, activates the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, brain areas that have been associated with positive feelings and reward processing. However, incongruent emotional states activated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as well as posterior superior temporal gyrus/sulcus, both playing a role in conflict processing.
当我们微笑时，我们感到快乐，当我们皱眉时，我们感到悲伤。然而，模仿文献也表明，当我们的互动伙伴表现出我们的行为方式时，我们会感到快乐。那么，如果我们表达悲伤，而我们察觉到有人在模仿我们，会发生什么呢？在当前的研究中，参与者被呈现出快乐或悲伤的面孔，同时自己表达其中一种情绪。功能性磁共振成像被用来测量在观察到的情绪与表达的情绪一致或不一致的情况下的神经反应。我们的结果表明，无论情绪如何，处于一致的情绪状态会激活内侧眶额皮质和腹内侧前额皮质，这些脑区与积极的感觉和奖励处理有关。然而，不一致的情绪状态会激活背外侧前额皮质以及后上颞叶/回，两者都在冲突处理中发挥作用。
