Parieto-Frontal networks mediate contextual influences in the appraisal of pain and disgust facial expressions

We appraise other people’s emotions by combining multiple sources of information, including somatic facial/body reactions and surrounding contexts. A wealthy literature revealed how people take into account contextual information in the interpretation of facial expressions, but the mechanisms mediating such influence still need to be duly investigated. Across two experiments, we mapped the neural representations of distinct (but comparably unpleasant) negative states, pain and disgust, as conveyed by naturalistic facial expressions or contextual sentences. Negative expressions lead to shared activity in fusiform gyrus and superior temporal sulcus. Instead, pain contexts recruited postcentral and insular cortex, whereas disgust contexts triggered the temporo-parietal cortex and hippocampus/amygdala. When pairing the two sources of information together, we found higher likelihood of classifying an expression according to the sentence preceding it. Furthermore, networks specifically involved in processing contexts were re-enacted whenever a face followed said context. Finally, the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex showed increased activity for consistent (vs. inconsistent) face-contexts pairings, suggesting that it integrates state-specific information from the two sources. Overall, our study reveals the heterogeneous nature of face-context integration, which operates both according to a face-independent and face-conditional fashion, with the latter mediated by the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex.