Brain regions involved in recognizing facial emotion or identity: an oxygen-15 PET study

The functional neuroanatomy of emotion recognition is inadequately understood despite well-documented clinical situations where emotion recognition is impaired (aprosodia). Oxygen-15 water positron-emission tomography (PET) was used to study 9 healthy women volunteers during three match-to-sample conditions, each repeated twice: a study task matching facial emotions and control tasks matching spatial positions or facial identity. Results suggest that the higher order functional neural network for recognizing emotion in visual input likely involves the right anterior cingulate and the bilateral inferior frontal gyri.