Disrupting Pre-SMA Activity Impairs Facial Happiness Recognition: An Event-Related TMS Study

V.R. and L.G. contributed equally to this work. It has been suggested that the left pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) could be implicated in facial emotion expression and recognition, especially for laughter/happiness. To test this hypoth-esis, in a single-blind, randomized crossover study, we investigated the impact of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on perform-ances of 18 healthy participants during a facial emotion recognition task. Using a neuronavigation system based on T1-weighted mag-netic resonance imaging of each participant, TMS (5 pulses, 10 Hz) was delivered over the pre-SMA or the vertex (control condition) in an event-related fashion after the presentation of happy, fear, and angry faces. Compared with performances during vertex stimu-lation, we observed that TMS applied over the left pre-SMA specifi-cally disrupted facial happiness recognition (FHR). No difference was observed between the 2 conditions neither for fear and ange