TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of the cerebellum in explicit and incidental processing of facial emotional expressions
T2 - A study with transcranial magnetic stimulation
AU - Ferrari, Chiara
AU - Oldrati, Viola
AU - Gallucci, Marcello
AU - Vecchi, Tomaso
AU - Cattaneo, Zaira
N1 - Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/12/12
Y1 - 2017/12/12
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.026
DO - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.026
M3 - Article
C2 - 29246845
VL - 169
SP - 256
EP - 264
JO - NeuroImage
JF - NeuroImage
SN - 1053-8119
ER -