Scientific article
English

Disrupting Pre-SMA Activity Impairs Facial Happiness Recognition: An Event-Related TMS Study

Published inCerebral cortex, vol. 23, no. 7, p. 1517-1525
Publication date2013
Abstract

It has been suggested that the left pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) could be implicated in facial emotion expression and recognition, especially for laughter/happiness. To test this hypothesis, in a single-blind, randomized crossover study, we investigated the impact of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on performances of 18 healthy participants during a facial emotion recognition task. Using a neuronavigation system based on T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging of each participant, TMS (5 pulses, 10 Hz) was delivered over the pre-SMA or the vertex (control condition) in an event-related fashion after the presentation of happy, fear, and angry faces. Compared with performances during vertex stimulation, we observed that TMS applied over the left pre-SMA specifically disrupted facial happiness recognition (FHR). No difference was observed between the 2 conditions neither for fear and anger recognition nor for reaction times (RT). Thus, interfering with pre-SMA activity with event-related TMS after stimulus presentation produced a selective impairment in the recognition of happy faces. These findings provide new insights into the functional implication of the pre-SMA in FHR, which may rely on the mirror properties of pre-SMA neurons.

Keywords
  • Adult
  • Emotions
  • Facial Expression
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Motor Cortex/physiology
  • Neuronavigation
  • Photic Stimulation
  • Recognition (Psychology)/physiology
  • Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
  • Young Adult
Citation (ISO format)
ROCHAS, Vincent et al. Disrupting Pre-SMA Activity Impairs Facial Happiness Recognition: An Event-Related TMS Study. In: Cerebral cortex, 2013, vol. 23, n° 7, p. 1517–1525. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhs133
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Article (Published version)
accessLevelRestricted
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1047-3211
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