The Neural Processing of Emotional Pictures: Evidence from Evoked Potentials and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Emotionally salient stimuli such as naturalistic scenes, facial expressions and emotional body language elicit increased neuronal activation in associative sensory cortex, as well affective cortical and sub-cortical networks. It has been suggested, that the affective quality of these stimuli is largely a result of evolutionary predisposition and that their selective perceptual encoding may thus be biologically prepared. The present study tested whether comparable neuronal processing patterns are also elicited by expressive hand gestures, bearing distinct emotional yet highly symbolic meaning. During functional scanning, 33 subjects passively viewed blocked picture presentations of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant hand gestures. Consistent with a priori assumptions, emotionally meaningful gestures were associated with increased BOLD activations in extrastriate visual cortex, as well as in parietal areas. These results suggest that emotional significance detected by the brain is not exclusively founded in the genetic heritage of the human species but may also get attached to highly symbolic stimuli by social learning. Affective hand gestures