Interazioni Cerebellari Mediali-Laterali Durante il Riconoscimento delle Emozioni: Uno Studio TMS

The cerebellum is increasingly recognized for its role in emotional processing beyond motor control. Functional specialization within the cerebellum suggests that medial regions are involved in affective and autonomic regulation, whereas lateral cerebellar hemispheres contribute to higher order cognitive aspects of emotional processing. The study employed two-session, condition-and-perturb transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) paradigm to investigate whether lateral cerebellar recruitment depends on intact medial processing during emotion recognition. Thirty-five participants completed an emotional recognition task during two stimulation sessions, each including both an offline (conditioning) and an online (perturbing) stimulation protocol. In each session, offline TMS was administered over either the left paravermal medial cerebellum or over the vertex (control site), followed by online stimulation applied to either the posterolateral cerebellum or the vertex. The emotion recognition task was performed twice in each session, once for each online stimulation site. Analysis of inverse efficiency (IE = correct RT/accuracy) scores showed that perturbing TMS over the posterolateral cerebellum affected participants’ performance relative to the vertex. No other effects were significant. These findings do not support a hierarchical dependency between paramedial and posterolateral cerebellar regions and are more consistent with a parallel processing model.