Structural Neuroanatomy of Human Facial Behaviors

The human face plays a central role in emotions and social communication. The emotional and somatic motor networks generate facial behaviors, but whether facial behaviors have representations in the structural anatomy of the human brain is unknown. We coded 16 facial behaviors in 55 healthy older adults who viewed five videos that elicited emotions and examined whether individual differences in facial behavior related to regional variation in gray matter volume. Voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed that greater emotional facial behavior during the disgust trial (i.e., greater brow furrowing and eye tightening as well as nose wrinkling and upper lip raising) and the amusement trial (i.e., greater smiling and eye tightening) was associated with larger gray matter volume in midcingulate cortex, supplementary motor area, and precentral gyrus, areas spanning both the emotional and somatic motor networks. When measured across trials, however, these facial behaviors (and others) only related to gray matter volume in the precentral gyrus, a somatic motor network hub. These findings suggest that the emotional and somatic motor networks store structural representations of facial behavior, and that the midcingulate cortex is critical for generating the predictable movements in the face that arise during emotions.