title: A mirror mechanism for smiling in the anterior cingulate cortex.
abstract: It was recently proposed that the neural substrate mediating smile production might play a key role also in the recognition of others' smile. This hypothesis, however, has been challenged by difficulties in eliciting ecological smiling in standard laboratory settings. Here we report of a case where these difficulties were overcome by combining electrical stimulation and intracranial electroencephalogram recording in a patient with drug-resistant focal epilepsy. The stimulation of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) elicited a smiling facial expression. The same leads exploring pACC showed an increase of gamma band activity (50-100 Hz) during the observation of video-clips depicting actors laughing, relative to video-clips depicting actors crying or producing a neutral expression. These findings indicate that both smile production and recognition are encoded in pACC and further support the role of this region in social cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma.
authors.forename: Fausto
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Caruana
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma.
authors.forename: Pietro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Avanzini
authors.affiliation: Claudio Munari Center for Epilepsy Surgery, Ospedale Niguarda-Ca' Granda.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Gozzo
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma.
authors.forename: Veronica
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Pelliccia
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Casaceli
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma.
authors.forename: Giacomo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rizzolatti
mesh_terms: D003448:Crying / Q000502:physiology; D000069279:Drug Resistant Epilepsy / Q000503:physiopathology; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D004569:Electroencephalography; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006179:Gyrus Cinguli / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007845:Laughter; D008297:Male; D012904:Smiling / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult