New neuroscience research reveals how our brains recognise emotions. But what does that mean for people who have lived with abuse?

By Tess Hunneybell | 20 October 2026

Have you ever had someone say something perfectly reasonable to you, but something about the way they said it made you flinch? Perhaps they said, “It’s okay,” but you interpret their tone of voice as saying it’s definitely NOT okay. Or someone says, “Of course I’m here for you,” and you can hear perfectly well that they’re already halfway out of the door.

I’ve always been fascinated by how much we communicate without actually saying what we mean. Sarcasm is a good example. It can be a way of expressing anger without admitting to being angry. Even I sometimes find myself confused in a sarcastic conversation. Are they joking? Are they annoyed? Or are they actually angry with me? And if you question it, you might be told, “Oh, I was only joking.” Sometimes the tone of voice carries far more of the message than the words themselves.

So when I came across some new neuroscience research about how our brains recognise emotions through faces and voices, I was immediately interested. A study published on 19 October 2026 in the Journal of Neuroscience, led by Stefania Mattioni, examined how 24 people’s brains responded to emotional expressions. We know that some parts of the brain are particularly responsive to faces, while others are more responsive to voices. But the researchers discovered that these systems aren’t as separate as we might think.

When participants heard emotions expressed through voices, areas normally associated with faces also represented some of that emotional information. And when they saw facial expressions, areas associated with voices did something similar. In certain brain regions, the researchers even found shared patterns of emotional information, whether the emotion was seen or heard. In simple terms, our brains don’t process facial expressions and emotional tones entirely independently. Some brain regions represent emotional information across both.

The study wasn’t about trauma, but it made me think about something I encounter regularly in psychotherapy. We talk a lot about hypervigilance, being unusually alert to possible danger, particularly among people who have experienced abuse. But I think we need to be careful about what we assume that means. Someone who grew up with abuse may have spent years listening to changes in someone’s voice, watching their expressions and trying to anticipate what might happen next. A particular tone, a look, a pause before answering. These things may have mattered enormously, and after years of paying attention, that person may become very good at recognising certain behaviours.

So when someone tells me that another person’s tone of voice feels hostile or threatening, why would I automatically assume they’ve misunderstood it? They might be absolutely right.

There’s also an important distinction between recognising someone’s behaviour and how deeply that behaviour affects you. Imagine someone speaks to you sarcastically or dismissively. You recognise it, and it hurts. Someone else might hear exactly the same remark, recognise the sarcasm and shrug it off. Does that mean you misunderstood what happened? Of course not. For someone who has experienced years of criticism, humiliation or emotional abuse, that remark might carry far more emotional weight. The impact may be greater, but that doesn’t mean their perception was wrong.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should always trust our gut. I’m not entirely comfortable with that advice because our instincts aren’t always accurate. Sometimes we’re responding to what’s happening now, and sometimes we’re responding to something that happened years ago. Someone might be quiet because they’re tired, but if you’ve experienced silence as punishment, you might interpret it as anger. The feeling is real, but the interpretation may or may not be accurate. That’s why we need to consider the individual, their history, the relationship and what actually happened. Sometimes our past helps us recognise behaviour accurately. Sometimes it influences us to expect something that isn’t happening. Sometimes both things are true.

There’s another aspect of this that concerns me, particularly in psychotherapy. People who have experienced emotional abuse have often been told they’re too sensitive, imagining things or making a fuss about nothing. When someone repeatedly manipulates another person into doubting their own perceptions or judgement, that can amount to gaslighting. Imagine finally finding the courage to talk about your experiences, only to be told that because you have a trauma history, you’re probably misinterpreting someone else’s behaviour. Perhaps you are, but perhaps you aren’t. If we automatically explain someone’s concerns away as a trauma response, we risk dismissing their experience in much the same way it may have been dismissed before.

Equally, we shouldn’t encourage people to believe that every uncomfortable feeling proves another person is behaving badly. Good psychotherapy isn’t about teaching someone to distrust themselves, or to trust every instinct without question. It’s about helping them understand their responses, examine what’s happening and make their own decisions about what behaviour they’re prepared to accept. The aim is certainly not to make someone more comfortable with being treated badly.

What I find particularly interesting about this new study is the questions it raises. If our brains represent emotional information across faces and voices, what happens when someone has spent years paying exceptionally close attention to those signals? Do they become more sensitive to certain behaviours, more accurate at recognising them, or simply more affected by what they perceive? The researchers weren’t studying trauma survivors, so their findings don’t answer these questions, but I think they’re worth exploring.

Because when someone who has experienced abuse tells us that another person’s tone of voice felt wrong, perhaps we should be interested in what they heard before we start explaining why they might have misunderstood it. Sometimes the problem isn’t that someone is too sensitive. Sometimes they’ve heard exactly what was being communicated.

And I think that’s worth talking about.

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Research reference: Mattioni, S., Falagiarda, F., Arya, T., Gau, R., Rezk, M., Battal, C., Van Audenhaege, A., & Collignon, O. (2026). Representation of emotional expressions across the face and voice brain networks. Journal of Neuroscience, 19 October 2026. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0366-26.2026

Tess Hunneybell is a trauma psychotherapist and founder of Healing Trauma Retreats in Umbria, Italy.