Explicit and Implicit Emotion Processing in the Cerebellum: A Meta‑analysis and Systematic Review

The cerebellum’s role in affective processing is increasingly recognized in the literature, but remains poorly understood, despite abundant clinical evidence for affective disruptions following cerebellar damage. To improve the characterization of emotion processing and investigate how attention allocation impacts this processing, we conducted a meta-analysis on task activation foci using GingerALE software. Eighty human neuroimaging studies of emotion including 2761 participants identified through Web of Science and ProQuest databases were analyzed collectively and then divided into two categories based on the focus of attention during the task: explicit or implicit emotion processing. The results examining the explicit emotion tasks identified clusters within the posterior cerebellar hemispheres (bilateral lobule VI/Crus I/II), the vermis, and left lobule V/VI that were likely to be activated across studies, while implicit tasks activated clusters including bilateral lobules VI/Crus I/II, right Crus II/lobule VIII, anterior lobule VI, and lobules I-IV/V. A direct comparison between these categories revealed five overlapping clusters in right lobules VI/Crus I/Crus II and left lobules V/VI/Crus I of the cerebellum common to both the explicit and implicit task contrasts. There were also three clusters activated significantly more for explicit emotion tasks compared to implicit tasks (right lobule VI, left lobule VI/vermis), and one cluster activated more for implicit than explicit tasks (left lobule VI). These findings support previous studies indicating affective processing activates both the lateral hemispheric lobules and the vermis of the cerebellum. The common and distinct activation of posterior cerebellar regions by tasks with explicit and implicit attention demonstrates the supportive role of this structure in recognizing, appraising, and reacting to emotional stimuli

Sensory contribution to vocal emotion deficit in patients with cerebellar stroke

In recent years, there has been increasing evidence of cerebellar involvement in emotion processing. Difficulties in the recognition of emotion from voices (i.e., emotional prosody) have been observed following cerebellar stroke. However, the interplay between sensory and higher-order cognitive dysfunction in these deficits, as well as possible hemispheric specialization for emotional prosody processing, has yet to be elucidated. We investigated the emotional prosody recognition performances of patients with right versus left cerebellar lesions, as well as of matched controls, entering the acoustic features of the stimuli in our statistical model. We also explored the cerebellar lesion-behavior relationship, using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Results revealed impairment of vocal emotion recognition in both patient subgroups, particularly for neutral or negative prosody, with a higher number of misattributions in patients with right-hemispheric stroke. Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping showed that some emotional misattributions correlated with lesions in the right Lobules VIIb and VIII and right Crus I and II. Furthermore, a significant proportion of the variance in this misattribution was explained by acoustic features such as pitch, loudness, and spectral aspects. These results point to bilateral posterior cerebellar involvement in both the sensory and cognitive processing of emotions

Spécialisation et intégration fonctionnelle du cervelet dans la reconnaissance des expressions vocales émotionnelles

Des études récentes ont permis de révéler l’implication du cervelet dans les fonctions cognitives et émotionnelles. Toutefois, son rôle lors du traitement des émotions vocales demeure à préciser. Les deux premières études de cette thèse ont permis de mettre en évidence le rôle fonctionnel du cerebrum parvum lors du traitement des émotions vocales, à la fois lors de l’étape d’intégration de la signification émotionnelle à partir des paramètres acoustiques, mais également lors de l’ultime étape impliquant des processus cognitifs. Des liens entre le cervelet et certaines régions impliquées dans la reconnaissance des émotions vocales ont été démontrées au cours de la dernière étude, confirmant l'intégration fonctionnelle de ce dernier au sein des réseaux neuronaux sous-tendant un tel traitement. Ces résultats participent à la démonstration de la spécialisation et l'intégration fonctionnelles du cervelet dans la détection, la prédiction et l’organisation des patterns temporels, permettant l'adaptation de l'organisme à un environnement dynamique.</p

Le rôle du cervelet dans la reconnaissance de la prosodie émotionnelle : étude auprès de patients cérébrolésés

Découvert depuis l’antiquité, le cervelet, et plus précisément l’étude de son rôle fonctionnel, a pendant très longtemps été marginalisé. Si la participation de ce dernier dans l’activité motrice nous parait aujourd’hui être une évidence, le sujet semble un peu plus ambigu lorsqu’il s’agit de discuter de son implication dans les processus cognitifs et surtout émotionnels. La recherche empirique menée dans le cadre de ce mémoire a pour but d’évaluer la reconnaissance de la prosodie émotionnelle chez les patients avec AVC du cervelet. Pour ce faire, une tâche de reconnaissance de prosodie émotionnelle, où chaque émotion vocale pouvait être évaluée de manière continue et sur différentes échelles, a été utilisée. Un déficit pour la reconnaissance de toutes les prosodies émotionnelles était attendu et plus particulièrement chez les patients avec une lésion cérébelleuse gauche. Les résultats montrent, dans un premier temps, un effet significatif de la lésion cérébelleuse sur la reconnaissance de la prosodie de peur..

Principles of Brain and Emotion: Beyond the Cortico-Centric Bias

Affective neurosciences have largely contributed to the elaboration of theoretical and neuroanatomical models through research conducted in non-primate animals and human beings. However, for methodological and historical reasons, knowledge has developed by focusing mainly on the cerebral cortex, resulting in a lack of investigations of the functional aspects of subcortical structures such as the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. The close anatomical connections revealed between these two structures, as well as their reciprocal connections with the cerebral cortex, lead to a vertically organized model of the brain. Both the cerebellum and the basal ganglia are involved in the different components required during an emotional episode. Their respective specificity in the analysis of temporal patterns contributes to the optimal processing of emotional signals such as those that can be conveyed by the voice (emotional prosody). Internal temporally structured event representation, built from the salient modulation extractions performed by the cerebellum, is used by the basal ganglia to recruit and synchronize the activity of the cortical and subcortical structures required for the relevant processes.</p

Rôle du cervelet dans les émotions

Le cervelet a pendant très longtemps été considéré comme une structure étant exclusivement réservée au contrôle moteur, et ce n’est que depuis la fin du siècle passé que des études neuro-anatomiques, mais également cliniques et de neuro-imagerie, ont contribué à suggérer un rôle du cervelet dans les processus émotionnels chez l’humain. Plus spécifiquement, de par son intégration au sein des circuits neuronaux distribués sous-tendant les fonctions sensorimotrices, associatives et limbiques, le cervelet se révèle être un candidat idéal pour participer aux différents processus se déroulant au sein des composantes sous-tendant l’épisode émotionnel. D’un point de vue fondamental, les résultats des divers travaux présentés dans cet article suggèrent une spécialisation et intégration fonctionnelle de ce petit cerveau dans les émotions. Notamment, des propositions récentes suggèrent que le cervelet participerait à l’ajustement continu, en lien avec les modèles internes, du processus dit de « chunking ». Ces recherches ont également un impact clinique puisqu’elles permettent de sensibiliser les praticiens et chercheurs à une évaluation systématique des fonctions émotionnelles chez les personnes présentant un dysfonctionnement cérébelleux

Sensitivity to emotion intensity and recognition of emotion expression in neurotypical children

This study assessed two components of face emotion processing: emotion recognition and sensitivity to intensity of emotion expressions and their relation in children age 4 to 12 (N = 216). Results indicated a slower development in the accurate decoding of low intensity expressions compared to high intensity. Between age 4 and 12, children discriminated high intensity expressions better than low ones. The intensity of expression had a stronger impact on overall face expression recognition. High intensity happiness was better recognized than low intensity up to age 11, while children 4 to 12 had difficulties discriminating between high and low intensity sadness. Our results suggest that sensitivity to low intensity expressions acts as a complementary mediator between age and emotion expression recognition, while this was not the case for the recognition of high intensity expressions. These results could help in the development of specific interventions for populations presenting socio-cognitive and emotion difficulties

Relation between processing facial identity and emotional expression in typically developing school-age children and those with Down syndrome

The main purposes of this research were to examine the relation between the processing of face identity and emotion expressions and then discern the significance of emotional expressions using Bruce et al. (2000) tasks. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 examined 225 typically developing (TD) children age 4 to 12. Results suggested that early recognition of complete faces and interpretation of emotional expression might depend on local processing abilities, while the recognition of masked faces and emotion expression matching seemed to share configural processing. Study 2 compared 22 children with Down syndrome (DS) to two TD groups matched on mental age (MA group) and chronological age (CA group). Results showed that children with DS processed the identity of complete faces (local processing) similarly to the MA and CA groups. In contrast, their performances for masked faces (configural processing) indicated a developmental delay as they were only comparable to the MA group. Children with DS were also able to identify the emotion expressions according to labels as well as the two control groups, while they had more difficulties on the matching condition. Furthermore, specific difficulties in processing the surprise expression were observed, rather than general difficulties in encoding emotion expressions. Finally, their performances on emotion matching tasks seemed to be supported by local information processing, which might explain their lower scores compared to CA controls that mainly used configural information. These results could aid in the development of targeted interventions for DS to improve their social skills