Whether a person is sad, angry, happy or surprised, there is a real circuit in the brain that allows others to recognize it: a fundamental ability present in all animals because it allows them to interact with their own kind and increase the chances of survival. This emerges from new research conducted on mice and humans and the result of the work of a team from the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, with the collaboration of the Rovereto center and the University of Catania. This is a far from insignificant discovery as – explain the researchers – it could help to understand why, in conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, this ability is altered, thus allowing the development of new targeted therapies. The research results were included in a study already subjected to peer review and published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.
The exact brain mechanisms that regulate the ability to understand other people’s emotions have remained largely unknown: for this reason the group of researchers coordinated by Francesco Papaleo sought answers in this regard. Through several experiments, conducted on both mice and humans, scientists have discovered that the brain activity that regulates this ability is localized in a group of neurons which connects the prefrontal cortex and the retrosplenial cortex. The authors first studied the behavior of the mice by subjecting them to stress scenarios – for example by closing them in small spaces for a short time – and to relief scenarios – for example by depriving them of water for certain hours and giving it back to them shortly before the analysis – and then compared the results with an experiment involving over a thousand human participants. Each of them was placed in front of a screen where faces with angry, happy or neutral expressions were projected. During the exposure, the researchers recorded their brain activity monitoring the areas of the brain activated through magnetic resonance techniques. The results of the research – available online only in preview format but read in full by the editorial staff of The Independent – confirmed the correlation between the prefrontal cortex and the retrosplenial cortex and the recognition of emotions.
The results – obtained thanks to the collaboration with the Functional Neuroimaging laboratory of Rovereto, the Optical Approaches to Brain Function laboratory of Genoa, the Department of Biomedical and Biotechnological Sciences of the University of Catania and the Center for population neurosciences and stratified medicine of Fudan University in Shanghai – could therefore lead to development of new, more specific drugs in the treatment of particular conditions such as autism and schizophrenia: «We are enthusiastic about the results obtained because they constitute a first step towards understanding the different brain circuits with which our brain is able to codify and make us react to the emotions of others. We would like to have a broader vision of the functioning of these mechanisms also to understand how they are altered in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental pathologies”, stated Francesco Papaleo, researcher for the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and co-author of the research. «Currently the drugs taken to treat these conditions are not selective, affecting many types of neurons without making any distinction. So the idea is to develop targeted therapiesin order to reduce side effects by increasing the effectiveness of the treatment”, added Anna Monai, also a researcher for the IIT and co-author.
[di Roberto Demaio]
