Dirupo Giada, Di Paolo Vincent, Lettry Emilie, Schwab Kevin, Corradi-Dell'Acqua Corrado
Theory of Pain Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE), University of Geneva, Geneva 1202, Switzerland
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva 1202, Switzerland.
J Neurosci. 2025 Jan 22;45(4):e2233232024. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2233-23.2024.
We appraise other people's emotions by combining multiple sources of information, including somatic facial/body reactions and the surrounding context. Wealthy literature revealed how people take into account contextual information in the interpretation of facial expressions, but the mechanisms mediating such influence still need to be duly investigated. Across two experiments, we mapped the neural representations of distinct (but comparably unpleasant) negative states, pain, and disgust, as conveyed by naturalistic facial expressions or contextual sentences. Negative expressions led to shared activity in the fusiform gyrus and superior temporal sulcus. Instead, pain contexts recruited the supramarginal, postcentral, and insular cortex, whereas disgust contexts triggered the temporoparietal cortex and hippocampus/amygdala. When pairing the two sources of information together, we found a higher likelihood of classifying an expression according to the sentence preceding it. Furthermore, networks specifically involved in processing contexts were re-enacted whenever a face followed said context. Finally, the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) showed increased activity for consistent (vs inconsistent) face-context pairings, suggesting that it integrates state-specific information from the two sources. Overall, our study reveals the heterogeneous nature of face-context information integration, which operates both according to a state-general and state-specific principle, with the latter mediated by the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex.
我们通过整合多种信息来源来评估他人的情绪，这些信息来源包括躯体面部/身体反应以及周围环境。丰富的文献揭示了人们在解读面部表情时如何考虑情境信息，但介导这种影响的机制仍需进行适当研究。在两项实验中，我们描绘了由自然主义面部表情或情境句子所传达的不同（但同等不愉快）负面状态、疼痛和厌恶的神经表征。负面表情在梭状回和颞上沟引发了共同活动。相反，疼痛情境激活了缘上回、中央后回和岛叶皮质，而厌恶情境则触发了颞顶叶皮质以及海马体/杏仁核。当将这两种信息来源配对在一起时，我们发现根据其之前的句子对表情进行分类的可能性更高。此外，每当一张脸出现在所述情境之后时，专门参与处理情境的神经网络就会重新激活。最后，膝周内侧前额叶皮质（mPFC）在一致（相对于不一致）的面部 - 情境配对中显示出活动增加，这表明它整合了来自这两种信息来源的特定状态信息。总体而言，我们的研究揭示了面部 - 情境信息整合的异质性本质，它既按照一般状态原则又按照特定状态原则运作，后者由膝周内侧前额叶皮质介导。
