The Impact of the Perception of Primary Facial Emotions on Corticospinal Excitability

The link between emotional experience and motor body responses has long been acknowledged. A well-established approach to exploring the effect of the perception of emotional stimuli on the motor system is measuring variations in the excitability of the corticospinal tract (CSE) through motor-evoked potentials (MEP) elicited via transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Previous evidence has indicated a selective increase in MEP amplitude while participants view emotional stimuli, such as emotional facial expressions, compared to neutral cues. However, it is still not clear whether this effect depends on the specific emotional meaning conveyed by the stimulus. In the present study, we explored whether viewing faces expressing the primary emotions compared to faces with a neutral expression affects individuals’ CSE, measured using TMS-elicited MEPs. Specifically, we elicited MEPs from the left motor cortex (M1) while participants passively viewed the same faces expressing either anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, and no emotion (in different blocks). We found that the observation of fearful, angry, disgusted, and happy facial expressions was associated with a significant increase in the MEPs’ amplitude compared to neutral facial expressions, with a comparable enhancement in the CSE occurring across these emotions. In turn, viewing sad and surprised faces did not modulate the CSE. Overall, our findings suggest that only facial expressions that signal (real or potential) danger or a rewarding stimulus, but not emotional facial expressions per se, are capable of activating action-related mechanisms.