Authors: C. J. Harmer, K. V. Thilo, J. C. Rothwell & G. M. Goodwin
Published in Nature Neuroscience
It has been shown that different neural circuits of the brain are linked to recognizing different emotions. In this article, participants were asked to distinguish between angry and neutral faces, male and female faces, and happy and neutral faces. Transcranial magnetic stimulation over the medial-frontal cortex impairs the processing of angry emotion, but not happiness. In fact, TMS had opposite effects in recognizing the two emotions. After TMS, participants responded slower when trying to identify anger and faster when trying to identify happiness, yet there were no differences in accuracy.
Perhaps participants reacted faster to displays of happy emotion because it is more ideal. As humans, we would rather be happier than sad, and we have learned how seeing other people happy makes us happy. Maybe the tracks in the brain that are responsible for recognizing anger are not as easily activated because we subconsciously don’t want them to be activated.
This idea of differential attention to anger versus happiness is interesting. I was just reading a study on facial emotional recognition in children with autism, and these children, although often impaired in emotional recognition in general, seem to have more trouble recognizing negative emotions relative to positive ones.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of perceiving happiness in facial expressions as more ideal is very plausible. I read an article a long time ago about how you can actually make yourself happy when you are angry or sad by forcing yourself to smile, which releases some chemical. The article said that the processes seemed to be faster when this was done while looking in the mirror. Perhaps you are right and our subconscious does not want negative tracks to be activated in the brain, but encourages positive ones.
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