Functional brain asymmetry for emotions: psychological stress-induced reversed hemispheric asymmetry in emotional face p
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Functional brain asymmetry for emotions: psychological stress‑induced reversed hemispheric asymmetry in emotional face perception Miloš Stanković1 · Milkica Nešić2,3,4 Received: 4 January 2020 / Accepted: 2 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Empirical evidence has demonstrated functional (mostly right-biased) brain asymmetry for emotion perception, whereas recent studies indicate that acute stress may modulate left and/or right hemisphere activation. However, it is still unknown whether emotion perception can be influenced by stress-induced hemispheric activation since behavioral studies report inconsistent or even contradictory results. We sought to reevaluate this gap. Eighty-eight healthy Caucasian university students participated in the study. In half of the randomly selected participants, acute psychological stress was induced by displaying a brief stressful movie clip (the stress condition), whereas the other half were shown a neutral movie clip (the non-stress condition). Prior to (the baseline) and following the movie clip display an emotion perception task was applied by presenting an emotional (happy, surprised, fearful, sad, angry, or disgusted) or neutral face to the left or right visual field. We found a more accurate perception of emotional and neutral faces presented to the LVF (the right hemisphere) in the baseline. However, we revealed that after watching a neutral movie clip, behavioral performance in emotional and neutral face perception accuracy became relatively equalized for both visual fields, whereas after watching a stressful movie clip, the RVF (the left hemisphere) even became dominant in emotional face perception. We propose a novel hemispheric functional-equivalence model: the brain is initially right-biased in emotional and neutral face perception by default; however, psychophysiological activation of a distributed brain-network due to watching neutral movie clips redistributes hemispheric performance toward relative equivalence. Moreover, even reversed hemispheric asymmetry may occur. Keywords Stress · Emotion perception · Functional brain asymmetry · Hemispheric dominance · Hemispheric functionalequivalence model · Face perception
Introduction Communicated by Carlo Alberto Marzi. The research was conducted at the Faculty of Medicine in Niš, Serbia http://www.medfak.ni.ac.rs/. * Miloš Stanković [email protected] Milkica Nešić [email protected] 1
General and Experimental Psychology, Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
2
Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Niš, Niš, Serbia
3
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Niš, Serbia
4
Center for Cognitive Science, University of Niš, Niš, Serbia
A growing body of evidence suggests that stress may modulate functional brain asymmetry (FBA). Stress may affect the functional activity of the left hemisphere (LH) and/or the right hemisphere (RH) due to hormonal effects (e.g.,
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