Projects
» Cerebral processing of emotional gestures
Functional Representation of isolated hand movements, body referred movements and expressive gesturesM. Lotze, U. Halsband, M. Reimold und A. Laihinen:
This project started as a cooperation with Ulrike Halsband from the Institute of Neuropsychology of the University of Freiburg and Matthias Reimold from the PET- Center in Tübingen.
In a pilot study, consisting of 20 healthy subjects, we analyzed the fMRI activity during the inspection of diverse gestures.
The interaction between the dopamine availability in the putamen and the converting of expressive gestures were investigated in nine patients, who suffered from idiopathic Parkinson’s disease.
Literature:
Lotze M., Heymans U., Birbaumer N., Veit R., Erb M., Flor H., Halsband U. (2006) Differential cerebral activation during observation of expressive gestures and motor acts. Neuropsychologia, 44: 1787-1795.
Lotze M., Reimold M., Heymans U., Laihinen A., Patt M., Halsband U. (2009) Reduced ventrolateral fMRI response during observation of emotional gestures related to reduced dopamine in the putamen. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience; 21(7):1321-31.
Lotze M. (2015) Hand and face observation and the role of frontal areas for emotional appraisal. Comparative Neuropsychology and Brain Imaging: Volume 2; Neuropsychology: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Lit Verlag, Berlin.
Lotze M. (2017) Handmotorik, Gestik und die Entwicklung der Sprache. Neuroreha 2/17.
Psychological influence on neural processing of gestures and prosody
D. Wildgruber, B. Kreifelt, C. Bruck (Tübingen):
The project in the SFB550 was continued by the group of Dirk Wildgruber in Tuebingen who conducted research on social relevance and STS-representation. They approached in the direction of personality traits and response to expressive gestures. In addition, they worked on being laughed at and social fear and missmatch between auditory prosodic and visual gestural information.
Literature:
Brück C., Kreifelts B., Kaza E., Lotze M., Wildgruber D. (2011) The Impact of Personality on the Cerebral Processing of Emotional Prosody, NeuroImage, 58(1): 259-68.
Jacob H.*., Brück C.*, Domin M., Lotze M., Wildgruber D. (2014) I can’t keep your face and voice out of my head: neural correlates of an attentional bias towards nonverbal emotional cues. Cerebral Cortex, 24(6):1460-73.
Kreifelts B., Brück C., Ritter J., Ethofer T., Domin M., Lotze M., Jacob H., Schlipf S., Wildgruber D. (2014) They are laughing at me: cerebral mediation of cognitive biases in social anxiety. PlosOne. 9(6):e99815.
Karle KN., Ethofer T., Jacob H., Brück C., Erb M., Lotze M., Nizielski S., Schütz A., Wildgruber D., Kreifelts B. (2018) Neurobiological correlates of emotional intelligence in voice and face perception networks. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 13(2):233-244.
Anders, S., Beck, C. Domin, M., Lotze, M. (2020) Empathic responses to unknown others are modulated by shared behavioural traits. Scientific Reports 10(1):1938.
Kreifelts B., Ethofer T., Wiegand A., Brück C., Wächter S., Erb M., Lotze M., Wildgruber D. (2020) The neural correlates of face-voice-integration in social anxiety disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry (Section Neuroimaging and Stimulation), 11:657.
Investigations on ticklish laughter
E. Wattendorff und M. Celio (Fribourg):
Elise Wattendorf from the group of M. Celio in Fribourg works on ticklish laughter and its neuronal representation. They focus on the hypothalamus and the anterior insular function.
Literature:
Wattendorf E., Westermann B., Fiedler K., Kaza E., Lotze M., Celio MR. (2012) Exploration of the neural correlates of ticklish laughter by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Cerebral Cortex,23(6):1280-9.
Wattendorf E., Westermann B., Lotze M., Fiedler K., Celio M.R. (2016) Insular-cortex activity and the evocation of laughter. J. Comp. Neurol., 524(8):1608-15.
Wattendorf E., Westermann B., Fiedler K., Pfannmöller J., Lotze M., Celio MR. (2019) Laughter is in the air: Involvement of key nodes of the emotional motor system in the anticipation of tickling. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience14(8):837-847.
Westermann B., Lotze M., Varra L., Versteeg N., Domin M., Nicolet L., Obrist M., Klepzig K., Marbot L., Lämmler L., Fiedler K., Wattendorf E. (2022) When laughter arrests speech: fMRI-based evidence. Philosophical Transactions Biological Sciences, 377(1863):20210182.
