From physical-mental synergy to health action: the mechanism path of promoting physical activity based on the interaction of cognitive body assessment and affective body assessment.

There is broad agreement among major models of face perception that our ability to decode facial information relies on processing both structural features—such as the overall configuration of the face—and dynamic cues, including facial muscle movements and gaze direction (; ; ). Over the past decade, a growing number of researchers have proposed that interpreting these dynamic signals may involve sensorimotor simulation (), a mechanism rooted in embodied cognition (), whereby motor and somatosensory regions involved in generating an action—such as moving a limb—are also recruited when observing the same action performed by someone else (; ). The idea of an isomorphic relationship between action execution and action observation has likewise been extended to the domain of facial expressions (; ; ; ; ). Several lines of evidence lend support to the sensorimotor simulation framework. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that simply observing facial expressions elicits activity in somatosensory and motor areas (; ; ; ; ; ), and importantly, that this activation appears to be selective for facial expressions rather than reflecting a general emotional response (). Moreover, the phenomenon of facial mimicry—subtle, automatic, and rapid facial movements that mirror the emotional content of the observed expression—provides evidence of a direct matching mechanism between perceived expressions and the observer’s own motor representations (; ; ; ). Yet despite this converging evidence, sensorimotor simulation remains a hypothesis rather than an established mechanism. While some lesion studies report impairments in expression recognition following damage to sensorimotor cortices (; ), other research yields contradictory results (; ). A critical test case comes from individuals with Moebius syndrome—a condition causing lifelong facial paralysis. If sensorimotor simulation were necessary for recognition, these individuals should show marked deficits. However, they often perform comparably to controls on standard tasks (; ), suggesting reliance on the ventral visual pathway for structural analysis (). Importantly, deficits emerge when expressions are visually ambiguous, such as with morphed stimuli () or highly degraded point-light displays ().