mulus which is considered a valid way of measuring the management of emotional information, but also the entire concept of adolescence that has emerged from developmental psychology and epidemiology and to which the neuroscience researchers themselves refer. In defining adolescence primarily by so-called risk behaviors, for which the difference between boys and girls is constitutive of public health policy interests concerning adolescence, the emotional adolescent brain is in fact gendered. Thus one observes that the sexing of the emotional adolescent brain proceeds less from the binary categorization by sex of the actors represented in the stimulus photographs and of the test subjects themselves than from the incorporation by the scanned image of discourses related to gender differences — here, the differential involvement in risk behaviors — which motivate the research.
Developing a set of photographs of facial affect, like mapping the treatment of emotional information among adolescents with fMRI, could be seen as the result of a practical and heuristic attempt to capture in sequential images the shifting and intangible states that are the emotions. In fact, the study of emotions in the laboratory requires that they be made controllable, both because of the practicalities of the experimental protocol — e.g. the limited space in a scanner — and in order to be able to make them compatible with the logic of recording and measuring inherent in scientific activity. In this context, photographs representing emotions, like fMRI-generated images of the brain reacting to those photographs, appear to be the preferred mechanisms for registering and reproducing emotions because of the undisputed relationship that would seem to exist between the photographic or the scanned image and the truth (Beaulieu 2002, Dumit 2004). That is to say, these images are considered to bear objective information that is independent of the context of their production and of the conditions that allow their reception. As I have shown in this account, however, the photo and the scan are dynamic elements that participate in the construction of scientific facts about the emotions. They participate in solidifying theories through their power to materialize scientific activity while also incorporating and circulating researchers’ discourses which are always contextually situated. For this reason, Ekman and Friesen’s photographs of facial affect are not only the reflection of actors miming an emotional state with their face, but they also signify the emotion itself, according to the principle of the universality of the emotions developed by these researchers, which allows the photos to be used as a stable stimulus of emotion. As for the scans of emotional adolescent brains produced from such stimuli, they offer, through the intermediary of the neuronal activation of young girls and young boys placed in the scanner, a visual translation of the emotions materialized in the photos in Ekman and Friesen’s POFA set. But through the succession of photographic images and then scanned images and their circulation among researchers, human guinea pigs and disciplines (psychology, epidemiology and the neurosciences), a space of transformation and added meaning has been created in which a difference can be seen between adults and adolescents as well as between young girls and young boys in the management of emotional information. It is principally through the integration of gendered research questions specific to adolescence, notably linked to the notion of risk behavior, in fMRI experiments that the image of a sexed emotional adolescent brain has taken shape. Paradoxically, this image contains traces of the photographs of facial affect whose scientific quality relies on their universality, independently of the specific age, sex or race of the individuals who express or perceive them.
Adolphs, Ralph, Daniel Tranel, Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio. 1994. « Impaired Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expression following Bilateral Damage to the Human Amygdala » Nature, n° 