title: Integrative Processing of Touch and Affect in Social Perception: An fMRI Study.
abstract: Social perception commonly employs multiple sources of information. The present study aimed at investigating the integrative processing of affective social signals. Task-related and task-free functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed in 26 healthy adult participants during a social perception task concerning dynamic visual stimuli simultaneously depicting facial expressions of emotion and tactile sensations that could be either congruent or incongruent. Confounding effects due to affective valence, inhibitory top-down influences, cross-modal integration, and conflict processing were minimized. The results showed that the perception of congruent, compared to incongruent stimuli, elicited enhanced neural activity in a set of brain regions including left amygdala, bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and left superior parietal cortex. These congruency effects did not differ as a function of emotion or sensation. A complementary task-related functional interaction analysis preliminarily suggested that amygdala activity depended on previous processing stages in fusiform gyrus and PCC. The findings provide support for the integrative processing of social information about others' feelings from manifold bodily sources (sensory-affective information) in amygdala and PCC. Given that the congruent stimuli were also judged as being more self-related and more familiar in terms of personal experience in an independent sample of participants, we speculate that such integrative processing might be mediated by the linking of external stimuli with self-experience. Finally, the prediction of task-related responses in amygdala by intrinsic functional connectivity between amygdala and PCC during a task-free state implies a neuro-functional basis for an individual predisposition for the integrative processing of social stimulus content.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences and Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Sjoerd J H
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Ebisch
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences and Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Anatolia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Salone
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences and Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Martinotti
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Leonardo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Carlucci
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH ZurichZurich, Switzerland; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, OxfordUK; Research Center for Motor Control and Neuroplasticity, KU LeuvenLeuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Dante
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mantini
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences and Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Mauro G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Perrucci
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Aristide
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Saggino
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences and Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Gian Luca
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Romani
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences and Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara Chieti, Italy.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Di Giannantonio
authors.affiliation: The Royal's Institute of Mental Health Research & University of Ottawa Brain and Mind Research Institute, Centre for Neural Dynamics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Georg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Northoff
authors.affiliation: Section of Physiology, Department of Neuroscience, University of ParmaParma, Italy; Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of LondonLondon, UK.
authors.forename: Vittorio
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Gallese
keywords: emotion; fMRI; facial expression; social perception; somatosensory; tactile sensation