Poster #199 - Youth’s Neural Response to Emotional Faces and Voices: Age-Related Changes in Common Regions of Activation

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Facial expressions and vocal prosody both provide important information about others’ emotional states and attitudes. Though these two types of nonverbal cues are similar in communicative function, the capacity to parse their emotional meaning requires different levels of executive functioning and follows a divergent developmental trajectory in childhood and adolescence. The protracted development of vocal emotion recognition (ER) skills compared to facial ER may be related to differential patterns of neural response in brain areas recruited for the processing of emotional stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the current study investigated the location and magnitude of common neural activation during both a facial and a vocal ER task in adolescents, and characterized age-related changes in brain response and performance accuracy.

Twenty-five typically-developing adolescents (60% female) 9 to 18 years of age (M age = 13.88, SD = 3.15) completed both a facial ER and a vocal ER task in the MRI scanner. Participants were asked to identify the intended emotion in pictures of children’s facial expressions and in audio recordings of children’s emotional tones of voice (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, or neutral). Neural event-related response amplitudes were estimated by convolving the hemodynamic response function with a base function that included combined regressors for the stimulus presentation (1s for face; amplitude-modulated in duration for voice) and response period (5s) contrasted to a baseline fixation cross. Contrast images for each participant were then fit to a multivariate model of the effect of emotion category and mean-centered age on whole-brain activation during the task. The resulting statistical parametric maps for the facial and vocal tasks were entered into a conjunction analysis, which examines areas that are activated in both tasks. Cluster-size threshold corrections were applied.

Alongside modality-specific activation for each task (Figure 1, Panel A), the conjunction analysis revealed that the facial and vocal ER tasks both elicited activation in subcortical regions (caudate and thalamus), visual-motor association areas (lingual gyrus/cuneus, right precentral gyrus), and the frontal cortex (insula, inferior frontal gyrus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; Figure 1, Panel B). Increased age was associated with reduced ER errors and greater neural activation in most of these regions in the vocal task, but not the facial ER task (Table 1). Further, frontal cortex activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, and precentral gyrus predicted performance on the vocal ER task beyond the effect of age.

These results suggest that the processing of emotional stimuli may rely on activation in both modality-specific and modality-independent regions in the brain. Age-related changes in activation within those common areas were evident during the vocal, but not the facial, ER task. Thus, similar to behavioural patterns of ER growth across adolescence, the maturation of neural response to emotional stimuli may progress differently for various nonverbal cues. In particular, the protracted maturation of the ability to accurately interpret vocal emotional expressions in adolescence, compared to the same skill with facial expressions, may be facilitated by age-related increases in activation in frontal regions of the brain.

Authors

• Michele Morningstar, Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
  Presenting Author

• Whitney I. Mattson, Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stanley Singer, Jr., Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joseph Venticinque, Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eric Nelson, Nationwide Children’s Hospital Columbus
  Non-Presenting Author