Psychological and Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Processing of Emotional Facial Expressions

Abstract

  Emotional facial expressions are primary media for human emotional communication. However, the psychological and neural mechanisms underpinning the processing of such facial expressions remain unclear. This article reviews the findings of our psychological and neuroscientific studies, which demonstrated the following: (1) that the emotional processing of facial expressions is accomplished unconsciously and is associated with amygdala activity at about 100 ms ; (2) that the perception of emotional facial expressions is more rapid than that of neutral expressions and is associated with enhanced activity in the visual cortices at about 200 ms ; and (3) that facial expressions automatically elicit facial mimicry and that this motor processing is related to activity in the inferior frontal gyrus at approximately 300 ms. These data suggest that few hundred ms needed to process processing of emotional facial expressions involve multiple psychological dimensions, including feeling, seeing, and mimicking, as well as widespread neural activities in the amygdala, visual cortices, and inferior frontal gyrus.