ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Degenerate pathway for processing smile and other emotional expressions in congenital facial palsy: an hdEEG investigation.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Application of facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) in psychophysiological research: Practical recommendations based on a systematic review of the literature.Behavior research methods · 2024Guideline
- Facial palsy reveals the sensorimotor contribution to facial-emotion recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Recognition of facial expressions from minimal five-point-light displays.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Effortless facial expression recognition without motor simulation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The portrait of Dorian Gray: spontaneous expression of happiness is an invariant kinematic marker.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- On the Role of Sensorimotor Experience in Facial Expression Perception.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
- Predictive language processing: integrating comprehension and production, and what atypical populations can tell us.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Mental Health Literacy about Personality Disorders: A Multicultural Study.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Close to me but unreachable: spotting the link between peripersonal space and empathy.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- The association of negative mood with automatic and effortful facial expression mimicry.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Testing EEG functional connectivity between sensorimotor and face processing visual regions in individuals with congenital facial palsy.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Facial Expression Time Processing in Typical Development and in Patients with Congenital Facial Palsy.Brain sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Influential theoretical models argue that an internal simulation mechanism (motor or sensorimotor simulation) supports the recognition of facial expressions. However, despite numerous converging sources of evidence, recent studies testing patients with congenital facial palsy (i.e. Moebius syndrome) seem to refute these theoretical models. However, these results do not consider the principles of neuroplasticity and degeneracy that could support the involvement of an alternative neural processing pathway in these patients. In the present study, we tested healthy participants and participants with Moebius syndrome in a highly sensitive facial expression discrimination task and concomitant high-density electroencephalographic recording. The results, both at the scalp and source levels, indicate the activation of two different pathways of facial expression processing in healthy participants and participants with Moebius syndrome, compatible, respectively, with a dorsal pathway that includes premotor areas and a ventral pathway. Therefore, these results support the reactivation of sensorimotor representations of facial expressions (i.e. simulation) in healthy subjects, in the place of an alternative processing pathway in subjects with congenital facial palsy. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.
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