Mirroring other's laughter. Cingulate, opercular and temporal contributions to laughter expression and observation

Pre-SMA activation and the perception of contagiousness and authenticity in laughter sounds

“…As volitional laughter is more closely associated with language, our results are supported by the finding that listening to speech modulates the excitability of the tongue muscles (Fadiga et al, 2002). Stimulating the ventral portion of the premotor cortex elicits smiling and laughter, but participants report that it is not associated with any emotions (Caruana et al, 2015(Caruana et al, , 2020. This region is primarily involved in the control of volitional sounds, not emotional ones.…”

“…Literature on the functional connections to and from the pre-SMA indicate that the emotional aspects of laughter processing and production originate in the ACCg (Jü rgens, 2002;Lima et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2002). Stimulation studies show that it elicits feelings of mirth, causes laughter, and is active during the observation of other's laughter (Caruana et al, 2015(Caruana et al, , 2018(Caruana et al, , 2020Sperli et al, 2006). The ACC projects to the pre-SMA through the anterior cingulate bundle (Gerbella et al, 2021).…”

Mirror neurons 30 years later: implications and applications

“…Perception of emotional displays and emotional reactions A large body of evidence indicates that human brain regions involved in the control and regulation of emotions also become active when witnessing emotional displays of others. Studies using a variety of approaches have provided robust evidence that a network (Figure 2B) including the amygdala [67], the insula [68], and the cingulate cortex [69] has a role in the expression, experience, and perception of facial and bodily emotional displays [70]. However, the existence of neuronal populations in these regions that selectively encode emotions of self, others, or both remains unknown, likely because the genuine physiological fingerprint of emotions, especially of those that emerge in social contexts, is generally difficult to reproduce in constrained laboratory settings.…”

“…For example, seeing a person injured on the ground may induce empathic alignment or even rage and hostility, depending on whether the person is a passerby injured by a criminal or a criminal injured by a police officer after having killed a man. The alignment of autonomic parameters and motor responses has been observed in settings in which people share positive emotional experiences and exhibit smiles [79] or laughter [69], and evidence suggests that anatomically distinct but interacting networks of brain areas underlie laughter in emotional and non-emotional contexts [80]. Other contexts can induce affective misalignment: during parentinfant interactions, despite an overall alignment in a dyad's affective state, when the overall arousal level of the dyad was high, parents responded to elevated arousal in the child by decreasing their own arousal, thereby helping to regulate the infant's affective state [81].…”

Hearing Someone Laugh and Seeing Someone Yawn: Modality-Specific Contagion of Laughter and Yawning in the Absence of Others

“…Laughter perception on the other hand recruits peri-motor areas (PMC, SMA, pre-SMA) and prefrontal regions in amPFC which are also involved in mirroring and mentalizing ( McGettigan et al, 2015 ; Billing et al, 2021 ). Indeed, there is a mirroring mechanism that maps laughter perception onto (emotional) laughter production ( Caruana et al, 2020 ), and recent evidence suggests that activity in a network implied in empathy and auditory-motor mirroring varies with the degree of laughter contagion ( Billing et al, 2021 ). Interestingly, insular cortex is crucial for the production of both speech ( Dronkers, 1996 ) and laughter ( Wattendorf et al, 2016 ).…”