ArticleBrain structure & function2015
Transcranial magnetic stimulation reveals two functionally distinct stages of motor cortex involvement during perception of emotional body language.
Article in Brain structure & function, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stronger Activation of the Right Primary Motor Cortex in the Early Processing Stage of Negative Emotional Scenes Stimulation.Depression and anxiety · 2026Article
- Empathic Dimensions Influence Motor Resonance Magnitude During Transitive but Not Intransitive Action Observation: A Retrospective Investigation.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Amelioration of emotional processing deficits in individuals with high trait anxiety following high-intensity interval training.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Enhancing Human Action Inhibition Through Cortico-Cortical Paired Associative Stimulation.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Early changes in corticospinal excitability for subliminally presented fearful body postures.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological evidence of motor contribution to vicarious affective touch.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Deficits in Emotional Perception-Related Motor Cortical Excitability in Individuals With Trait Anxiety: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study.Depression and anxiety · 2024Article
- Individual differences in intracortical inhibition predict action control when facing emotional stimuli.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The Impact of the Perception of Primary Facial Emotions on Corticospinal Excitability.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- The Role of Serotonin in Fear Learning and Memory: A Systematic Review of Human Studies.Brain sciences · 2023Review
- You are fired! Exclusion words induce corticospinal modulations associated with vicarious pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Mask-wearing selectivity alters observers' face perception.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Can the early visual processing of others' actions be related to social power and dominance?Psychological research · 2022Article
- Sensorimotor inhibition during emotional processing.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Indignation for moral violations suppresses the tongue motor cortex: preliminary TMS evidence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Distinct cerebellar regions for body motion discrimination.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- The Influence of Vicarious Fear-Learning in "Infecting" Reactive Action Inhibition.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Gender dimorphic M1 excitability during emotional processing: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study.PeerJ · 2022Article
- Stopping in (e)motion: Reactive action inhibition when facing valence-independent emotional stimuli.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Motor Resonance Flexibility to Emotion-Enriched Context in Parkinson's Disease Patients.Behavioural neurology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studies indicate that perceiving emotional body language recruits fronto-parietal regions involved in action execution. However, the nature of such motor activation is unclear. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) we provide correlational and causative evidence of two distinct stages of motor cortex engagement during emotion perception. Participants observed pictures of body expressions and categorized them as happy, fearful or neutral while receiving TMS over the left or right motor cortex at 150 and 300 ms after picture onset. In the early phase (150 ms), we observed a reduction of excitability for happy and fearful emotional bodies that was specific to the right hemisphere and correlated with participants' disposition to feel personal distress. This 'orienting' inhibitory response to emotional bodies was also paralleled by a general drop in categorization accuracy when stimulating the right but not the left motor cortex. Conversely, at 300 ms, greater excitability for negative, positive and neutral movements was found in both hemispheres. This later motor facilitation marginally correlated with participants' tendency to assume the psychological perspectives of others and reflected simulation of the movement implied in the neutral and emotional body expressions. These findings highlight the motor system's involvement during perception of emotional bodies. They suggest that fast orienting reactions to emotional cues--reflecting neural processing necessary for visual perception--occur before motor features of the observed emotional expression are simulated in the motor system and that distinct empathic dispositions influence these two neural motor phenomena. Implications for theories of embodied simulation are discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.