count, 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.
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