Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
Neuroimage. 2012 Feb 1;59(3):3050-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.10.005. Epub 2011 Oct 13.
Understanding others' emotions requires both the identification of overt behaviors ("smiling") and the attribution of behaviors to a cause ("friendly disposition"). Previous research suggests that whereas emotion identification depends on a cortical mirror system that enables the embodiment of observed motor behavior within one's own motor system, causal attribution for emotion depends on a separate cortical mentalizing system, so-named because its function is associated with mental state representation. We used fMRI to test an Identification-Attribution model of mirror and mentalizing system contributions to the comprehension of emotional behavior. Normal volunteers watched a set of ecologically valid videos of human emotional displays. During each viewing, volunteers either identified an emotion-relevant motor behavior (explicit identification) or inferred a plausible social cause (explicit attribution). These explicit identification and attribution goals strongly distinguished activity in the mirror and mentalizing systems, respectively. However, frontal mirror areas, though preferentially engaged by the identification goal, nevertheless exhibited activation when observers possessed the attribution goal. One of these areas-right posterior inferior frontal gyrus-demonstrated effective connectivity with areas of the mentalizing system during attributional processing. These results support an integrative model of the neural systems supporting the comprehension of emotional behavior, where the mirror system helps facilitate the rapid identification of emotional expressions that then serve as inputs to attributional processing in the mentalizing system.
理解他人的情绪既需要识别明显的行为（“微笑”），也需要将行为归因于原因（“友好的性格”）。之前的研究表明，情绪识别取决于一个皮质镜像系统，该系统使观察到的运动行为在自己的运动系统中得到体现，而情绪归因则取决于一个独立的皮质心理系统，之所以这样命名，是因为其功能与心理状态的表示有关。我们使用 fMRI 来测试镜像和心理系统对情绪行为理解的识别-归因模型的贡献。正常志愿者观看了一系列人类情感表达的生态有效视频。在每次观看过程中，志愿者要么识别出与情绪相关的运动行为（明确识别），要么推断出一个合理的社交原因（明确归因）。这些明确的识别和归因目标分别强烈区分了镜像和心理系统的活动。然而，尽管额皮质镜像区域优先参与识别目标，但在观察者拥有归因目标时，它们仍然会被激活。其中一个区域——右后下额回——在归因处理过程中表现出与心理系统区域的有效连通性。这些结果支持了一个支持情绪行为理解的神经系统综合模型，其中镜像系统有助于快速识别情绪表达，然后这些情绪表达作为归因处理的输入进入心理系统。
