Neural substrates of interpreting actions and emotions from body postures

Abstract

Accurately reading the body language of others may be vital for navigating the social world, and this ability may be influenced by factors, such as our gender, personality characteristics and neurocognitive processes. This fMRI study examined the brain activation of 26 healthy individuals (14 women and 12 men) while they judged the action performed or the emotion felt by stick figure characters appearing in different postures. In both tasks, participants activated areas associated with visual representation of the body, motion processing and emotion recognition. Behaviorally, participants demonstrated greater ease in judging the physical actions of the characters compared to judging their emotional states, and participants showed more activation in areas associated with emotion processing in the emotion detection task, whereas they showed more activation in visual, spatial and action-related areas in the physical action task. Gender differences emerged in brain responses, such that men showed greater activation than women in the left dorsal premotor cortex in both tasks. Finally, participants higher in self-reported empathy demonstrated greater activation in areas associated with self-referential processing and emotion interpretation. These results suggest that empathy levels and sex of the participant may affect neural responses to emotional body language.

Fig. 1

Example of a sample trial of the physical action task and the emotion task, and the order of presentation of the blocks in the experiment. Participants were asked what the character was doing (action) and what the character was feeling (emotion). Participants chose their answer from three alternative words, one of which best described the figure.

Fig. 2

(A) Increased activation in bilateral inferior frontal gyri, right middle temporal and left supplementary motor areas during emotion recognition from body postures (emotion vs action contrast); (B) increased activation in bilateral parietal, temporal and in cingulate areas during action recognition (action vs emotion contrast) (P < 0.001, uncorrected with an extent threshold of 40 voxels determined by Monte Carlo simulation).

Fig. 3

(A) Increased activation in men compared to women during emotion recognition in left anterior insula, left dorsal premotor cortex and right superior parietal lobule; (B) increased activation in women, relative to men, in the right inferior parietal lobule during emotion recognition (P < 0.001 uncorrected with an extent threshold of 40 voxels determined by Monte Carlo simulation).

Fig. 4

Scatter plots showing correlations between empathizing quotient and brain activation in six ROIs: middle cingulate cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, left medial frontal gyrus, left cerebellum area IV/V, right cerebellum area IV/V, and left middle temporal gyrus.