Science & Tech · Science & Environment · 4 hrs ago
Study Finds Shared Brain Processing for Emotions in Faces and Voices
Researchers from Belgium and Portugal used brain scans to study how 24 people processed emotions in faces and voices.
Participants watched or listened to actors showing happiness, sadness, disgust and fear.
An algorithm could use activity in some brain areas to identify emotions across both visual and vocal signals.
The findings suggest that brain regions linked to recognizing faces and voices may also help process emotional information, rather than handling only one type of input.
The study was small and could not scan some areas linked to face recognition, so larger studies are needed to test the results.
The findings offer a new view of how the brain reads emotion, but the researchers did not say what will happen next beyond further research.
Researchers found that some brain areas use overlapping patterns to process emotions heard in voices and seen in faces.
The study involved 24 participants who viewed or listened to actors expressing happiness, sadness, disgust and fear while researchers scanned their brains.
An algorithm could identify emotional responses across face and voice data in three brain areas.
The researchers said the findings challenge the idea that some brain regions process only fixed facial features.
The study was limited by its small sample and by brain areas the scanner could not reliably image.
- Who
- Researchers from Belgium and Portugal studied 24 participants. Stefania Mattioni of Ghent University co-authored the study.
- What
- The study found overlapping brain processing of emotions in faces and voices.
- When
- The study was published on October 22, 2026.
- Where
- Participants were scanned in an MRI machine; the researchers were from Belgium and Portugal.
- Why
- Researchers investigated how the brain represents the emotional importance of sights and sounds.
This story does not have two clearly opposing sides.
Participants watched or listened to recordings of actors displaying happiness, sadness, disgust and fear while their brains were scanned.
Researchers analyzed brain responses and found that an algorithm could identify emotions across face and voice data in three brain areas.
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
- Participants
- 24
- Emotions tested
- Happiness, sadness, disgust and fear
- Testing duration
- Roughly three hours
- Brain areas with crossmodal identification
- Temporal voice areas, posterior superior temporal sulcus and precentral gyrus
- Publication date
- October 22, 2026
What people are saying
In some regions, the brain even represented the same emotion similarly whether it was seen or heard.