ArticleBrain : a journal of neurology2024
Anatomo-functional basis of emotional and motor resonance elicited by facial expressions.
Article in Brain : a journal of neurology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- The shared neural substrates of emotional mimicry and emotional contagion: an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Two different mirror neuron pathways for social and non-social actions? A meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Pooled it
- From seeing to showing: towards a neuroscience of emotion production.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Movement-Anchored Emotional Memory: An Embodied Neuropsychological Framework.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Review
- Exploring the Sensorimotor System's Role in Emotional Authenticity Discrimination: A ccPAS Study.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Inside the frontal face network: multimodal evidence for distinct emotional and motor resonance circuits.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Independent component analysis of brain network alterations associated with cognitive impairment in coal workers' pneumoconiosis.BMC medical imaging · 2026Article
- High-resolution electrophysiological mapping of effective connectivity of lateral prefrontal cortex.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Article
- Effects of tRNS on perception of static and dynamic displays of social-emotional communication.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Recognition of facial expressions from minimal five-point-light displays.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Anterior insular cortex regulates depression-like and ASD-like behaviors via the differential contribution of two subsets of microglia.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Simulation theories predict that the observation of other's expressions modulates neural activity in the same centres controlling their production. This hypothesis has been developed by two models, postulating that the visual input is directly projected either to the motor system for action recognition (motor resonance) or to emotional/interoceptive regions for emotional contagion and social synchronization (emotional resonance). Here we investigated the role of frontal/insular regions in the processing of observed emotional expressions by combining intracranial recording, electrical stimulation and effective connectivity. First, we intracranially recorded from prefrontal, premotor or anterior insular regions of 44 patients during the passive observation of emotional expressions, finding widespread modulations in prefrontal/insular regions (anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus) and motor territories (Rolandic operculum and inferior frontal junction). Subsequently, we electrically stimulated the activated sites, finding that (i) in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, the stimulation elicited emotional/interoceptive responses, as predicted by the 'emotional resonance model'; (ii) in the Rolandic operculum it evoked face/mouth sensorimotor responses, in line with the 'motor resonance' model; and (iii) all other regions were unresponsive or revealed functions unrelated to the processing of facial expressions. Finally, we traced the effective connectivity to sketch a network-level description of these regions, finding that the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula are reciprocally interconnected while the Rolandic operculum is part of the parieto-frontal circuits and poorly connected with the former. These results support the hypothesis that the pathways hypothesized by the 'emotional resonance' and the 'motor resonance' models work in parallel, differing in terms of spatio-temporal fingerprints, reactivity to electrical stimulation and connectivity patterns.
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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.