Facial expressions: How brains process emotion
The research was done in the laboratories of Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology, and collaborator Ueli Rutishauser (PhD '08) of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a visiting associate in biology and biological engineering at Caltech. It appears in the April 21 issue of Nature Communications . "We have long known that the amygdala is important in processing emotion from faces," says Adolphs. "But now we are starting to understand that it incorporates a lot of complex information to make fairly sophisticated decisions that culminate in our judgments." When looking at a face, brain cells in the amygdala fire electrical impulses or "spikes" in response. However, the role of such face cells in social cognition remains unclear. Adolphs and his group measured the activity of these cells, or neurons, in patients while they were shown images of faces expressing different degrees of happiness ...