A causal role of the right superior temporal sulcus in emotion recognition from biological motion

Understanding the emotions of others through nonverbal cues is critical for successful social interactions. The right posterior superior temporal sulcus (rpSTS) is one brain region thought to be key in the recognition of the mental states of others based on body language and facial expression. In the present study, we temporarily disrupted functional activity of the rpSTS by using continuous, theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) to test the hypothesis that the rpSTS plays a causal role in emotion recognition from body movements. Participants (N=23) received cTBS of the rpSTS, which was individually localized using fMRI, and a vertex control site. Before and after cTBS, we tested the ability of participants to identify emotions from point-light biological motion stimuli and a non-biological global motion identification task. Results revealed that the ability of participants to accurately identify emotional states from biological motion was reduced following cTBS stimulation to the rpSTS, but was unimpaired following vertex stimulation. Accuracy on the global motion tasks was unaffected by cTBS to either site. These results support the causal role of the rpSTS in decoding information about other’s emotional state from their body movements and gestures.