Neural Basis of Decision Biases due to Facial Impression

Emotional and social information conveyed by faces can be detected rapidly and implicitly by our brain and influence our decisions during social interactions.

In a fMRI study using the Ultimatum games, a well-known economic game, we found that responder’s fairness judgment can be influenced by facial trustworthiness of proposer, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex plays a key role in this process by integrating signals from various emotional structures such as the amygdala and the insula. (Kim et al., Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2012)