Mirror-touch synaesthesia: the role of shared ... - UCL Discovery

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Chapter 7
Eimer, in press). The findings presented here add to this by demonstrating that
activity in rSI is implicated in not only facial (Adolphs et al., 2000; Pitcher et al.,
2008), but also auditory emotion perception and imply that sensorimotor resources
may sub-serve an emotion-general processing mechanism in healthy adults (Adolphs,
2002; Adolphs, 2003; Damasio, 1990; Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti, 2004;
Goldman and Sripada, 2005; Keysers and Gazzola, 2006).
In the current study I focussed on right hemisphere representations based on
previous fMRI, neuropsychological and TMS findings demonstrating the importance
of right hemisphere activity in affect recognition (Adolphs et al., 2000; Mitchell and
Crow, 2005; Pitcher et al., 2008; Pourtois et al., 2004; Van Lancker and Fromkin,
1973). There is some fMRI evidence that viewing static and dynamic facial
expressions evokes activity in bilateral primary somatosensory cortex and premotor
cortex (Montgomery and Haxby, 2008; van der Gaag et al., 2007). Further, in the
auditory domain, listening to non-vocal emotional expressions leads to bilateral
activations of the lateral premotor cortex (Warren et al., 2006). The lateralization of
these effects shall be addressed with further studies.
In sum, this study extends previous findings that rSI activity is important in
facial emotion recognition (Adolphs et al., 2000; Pitcher et al., 2008), by
demonstrating that neural activity in rSI is involved in emotion processing across
modalities. The findings also demonstrate that rPM activity reported in previous
fMRI studies is central to non-verbal auditory emotion discrimination. These
resources are not specifically required for discriminating the identity of others and
appear to play a specific role in facilitating emotion discrimination in healthy adults.