The role of the cerebellum in explicit and incidental processing of facial emotional expressions: A study with transcranial magnetic stimulation
The role of the cerebellum in explicit and incidental processing of facial emotional expressions: A study with transcranial magnetic stimulation
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DOI：
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.026
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发表时间：
2018-04-01
期刊：
影响因子：
5.7
通讯作者：
Cattaneo, Zaira
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ferrari, Chiara;Oldrati, Viola;Cattaneo, Zaira
越来越多的证据表明，小脑在非运动功能中起着至关重要的作用，有助于认知和情感处理。特别是，小脑可能是“边缘”网络的一个重要节点，不仅是情绪调节的基础，也是情绪感知和识别的基础。在这里，我们使用经颅磁刺激（TMS）来进一步阐明小脑在情绪知觉中的作用，具体测试了小脑对外显和附带情绪加工的贡献。特别是，在三个不同的实验中，我们发现（左）小脑的经颅磁刺激损害了参与者对面部情绪表情的分类能力（外显任务）和对情绪面孔的性别分类能力（附带情绪处理任务），但对中性面孔的性别没有影响。总的来说，我们的结果表明小脑参与感知面部刺激的情感内容，即使这是不相关的任务。
Growing evidence suggests that the cerebellum plays a critical role in non-motor functions, contributing to cognitive and affective processing. In particular, the cerebellum might represent an important node of the "limbic" network, underlying not only emotion regulation but also emotion perception and recognition. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to shed further light on the role of the cerebellum in emotional perception by specifically testing cerebellar contribution to explicit and incidental emotional processing. In particular, in three different experiments, we found that TMS over the (left) cerebellum impaired participants' ability to categorize facial emotional expressions (explicit task) and to classify the gender of emotional faces (incidental emotional processing task), but not the gender of neutral faces. Overall, our results indicate that the cerebellum is involved in perceiving the emotional content of facial stimuli, even when this is task irrelevant.