Attention and emotion: does rating emotion alter neural responses to amusing and sad films?

Which emotion regulation strategy is efficient for whom? Reappraisal and suppression efficiency for adaptive and maladaptive personality profiles

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to explore the efficiency of different emotion regulation strategies, specifically reappraisal and suppression, in relation to adaptive and maladaptive personality profiles.

BACKGROUND

Personality conditions emotions and influences emotion regulation. Of the available regulation strategies, reappraisal (reinterpreting the situation) is described as an efficient strategy, whereas suppression (not displaying the experienced emotion) carries higher physiological and cognitive costs. Little is known, however, about the influence of personality on these efficiencies.

METHOD

We tested the personality structure of 102 participants (Meanage = 20.75, SDage = 2.15), based on the Five-Factor Model and the Maladaptive Personality Trait Model. Experience, expressivity, and physiological arousal were recorded during the viewing of emotionally charged positive and negative images while participants reappraised, suppressed, or viewed the images without regulating their emotions.

RESULTS

We identified two clusters for adaptive personality ("Adaptive Resilient" and "Anti-resilient") and two for maladaptive personality ("Maladaptive Resilient" and "Under-controlled"). The major finding was for emotional experience in maladaptive personalities, where reappraisal was efficient in the Maladaptive Resilient profile, while none of the strategies brought relief in the Under-controlled profile.

CONCLUSION

This study, which systematically contrasts personality and efficiency of emotion regulation strategies, is one of the first attempts to refine the understanding of how personality influences the emotional regulation process.

Neural signatures of shared subjective affective engagement and disengagement during movie viewing

When watching a negative emotional movie, we differ from person to person in the ease with which we engage and the difficulty with which we disengage throughout a temporally evolving narrative. We investigated neural responses of emotional processing, by considering inter-individual synchronization in subjective emotional engagement and disengagement. The neural underpinnings of these shared responses are ideally studied in naturalistic scenarios like movie viewing, wherein individuals emotionally engage and disengage at their own time and pace throughout the course of a narrative. Despite the rich data that naturalistic designs can bring to the study, there is a challenge in determining time-resolved behavioral markers of subjective engagement and disengagement and their underlying neural responses. We used a within-subject cross-over design instructing 22 subjects to watch clips of either neutral or sad content while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants watched the same movies a second time while continuously annotating the perceived emotional intensity, thus enabling the mapping of brain activity and emotional experience. Our analyses revealed that between-participant similarity in waxing (engagement) and waning (disengagement) of emotional intensity was directly related to the between-participant similarity in spatiotemporal patterns of brain activation during the movie(s). Similar patterns of engagement reflected common activation in the bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regions often involved in self-referenced evaluation and generation of negative emotions. Similar patterns of disengagement reflected common activation in central executive and default mode network regions often involved in top-down emotion regulation. Together this work helps to better understand cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning engagement and disengagement from emotionally evocative narratives.

Subjective and neural reactivity during savoring and rumination

Repetitive thinking about negative emotions or events is strongly associated with worse mental health, whereas repetitive positive thought is generally believed to be beneficial. This observation is at odds with the idea that all forms of repetitive thinking share underlying neural mechanisms. To resolve this apparent discrepancy, the present study examined relationships between subjective affect and neural mechanisms during periods of sustained processing of positive (savoring) and negative (rumination) emotion. We also examined potential common moderators of savoring and rumination including memory specificity and sleep quality. Results indicated that individuals who experience high positive affect during savoring also are likely to experience more intense negative affect during rumination. fMRI-derived brain activity revealed common mechanisms of rumination and savoring. Memory specificity had common effects on neural correlates of rumination and savoring; sleep quality was not associated with mechanisms of savoring or rumination. These results suggest that repetitive engagement with positive and negative affect is similar both subjectively and mechanistically. Clinical interventions for rumination may benefit from capitalizing on preserved capacity for savoring.

Explicit and Implicit Emotion Processing in the Cerebellum: A Meta-analysis and Systematic Review

The cerebellum's role in affective processing is increasingly recognized in the literature, but remains poorly understood, despite abundant clinical evidence for affective disruptions following cerebellar damage. To improve the characterization of emotion processing and investigate how attention allocation impacts this processing, we conducted a meta-analysis on task activation foci using GingerALE software. Eighty human neuroimaging studies of emotion including 2761 participants identified through Web of Science and ProQuest databases were analyzed collectively and then divided into two categories based on the focus of attention during the task: explicit or implicit emotion processing. The results examining the explicit emotion tasks identified clusters within the posterior cerebellar hemispheres (bilateral lobule VI/Crus I/II), the vermis, and left lobule V/VI that were likely to be activated across studies, while implicit tasks activated clusters including bilateral lobules VI/Crus I/II, right Crus II/lobule VIII, anterior lobule VI, and lobules I-IV/V. A direct comparison between these categories revealed five overlapping clusters in right lobules VI/Crus I/Crus II and left lobules V/VI/Crus I of the cerebellum common to both the explicit and implicit task contrasts. There were also three clusters activated significantly more for explicit emotion tasks compared to implicit tasks (right lobule VI, left lobule VI/vermis), and one cluster activated more for implicit than explicit tasks (left lobule VI). These findings support previous studies indicating affective processing activates both the lateral hemispheric lobules and the vermis of the cerebellum. The common and distinct activation of posterior cerebellar regions by tasks with explicit and implicit attention demonstrates the supportive role of this structure in recognizing, appraising, and reacting to emotional stimuli.

Development and validation of an fMRI-informed EEG model of reward-related ventral striatum activation

Reward processing is essential for our mental-health and well-being. In the current study, we developed and validated a scalable, fMRI-informed EEG model for monitoring reward processing related to activation in the ventral-striatum (VS), a significant node in the brain's reward system. To develop this EEG-based model of VS-related activation, we collected simultaneous EEG/fMRI data from 17 healthy individuals while listening to individually-tailored pleasurable music - a highly rewarding stimulus known to engage the VS. Using these cross-modal data, we constructed a generic regression model for predicting the concurrently acquired Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) signal from the VS using spectro-temporal features from the EEG signal (termed hereby VS-related-Electrical Finger Print; VS-EFP). The performance of the extracted model was examined using a series of tests that were applied on the original dataset and, importantly, an external validation dataset collected from a different group of 14 healthy individuals who underwent the same EEG/FMRI procedure. Our results showed that the VS-EFP model, as measured by simultaneous EEG, predicted BOLD activation in the VS and additional functionally relevant regions to a greater extent than an EFP model derived from a different anatomical region. The developed VS-EFP was also modulated by musical pleasure and predictive of the VS-BOLD during a monetary reward task, further indicating its functional relevance. These findings provide compelling evidence for the feasibility of using EEG alone to model neural activation related to the VS, paving the way for future use of this scalable neural probing approach in neural monitoring and self-guided neuromodulation.

Current and lasting effects of affect labeling on late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes elicited by negative events

INTRODUCTION

Labeling the emotional aspect of self-unrelated stimuli (i.e., affect labeling) is a crucial strategy for implicit emotion regulation. However, it is uncertain whether affect labeling influences event-related potential (ERP) responses (e.g., the late positive potential, LPP) to negative stimuli in comparison with control conditions in which attention is shifted to the emotional content of the stimuli (e.g., affect matching). Additionally, it is unknown whether affect labeling has a lasting effect on the processing of negative stimuli.

METHODS

Participants were required to label the emotion (negative or neutral) of target pictures with two words, to match the emotion with alternative pictures or to merely view the target pictures. Target pictures were presented again immediately after the regulation task. After all the target pictures had been labeled, matched and viewed, the pictures were re-exposed for the third time.

RESULTS

The results showed that negative pictures elicited larger late LPP responses during the affect labeling task than during other tasks. However, the LPP responses were smaller for negative pictures in the affect labeling condition than in the other conditions when target pictures were re-exposed immediately after the task. When target pictures were re-presented again long after the regulation tasks, the LPP responses were smaller for negative stimuli with a history of affect labeling than viewing, whereas this effect did not differ between the affect labeling and matching conditions.

CONCLUSION

The current findings suggest that affect labeling has current effects and, to some extent, has lasting effects on negative stimulus processing.

Alternation in functional connectivity within default mode network after psychodynamic psychotherapy in borderline personality disorder

BACKGROUND

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by impairments in emotion regulation, impulse control, and interpersonal and social functioning along with a deficit in emotional awareness and empathy. In this study, we investigated whether functional connectivity (FC) within the default mode network (DMN) is affected by 1-year psychodynamic psychotherapy in patients with BPD.

METHODS

Nine BPD patients filled out the demography, Interpersonal Reactive Index (IRI), Toronto Alexithymia Scale 20 (TAS 20), the Alcohol, Smoking, and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST), and the Borderline Evaluation Severity over Time (BEST) questionnaire. The BPD group (9F) and the control group (9F) had a mean ± SD age of 28.2 ± 5.3 years and 30.4 ± 6.1 years, respectively. BPD subjects underwent longitudinal resting-state fMRI before psychodynamic psychotherapy and then every 4 months for a year after initiating psychotherapy. FC in DMN was characterized by calculating the nodal degree, a measure of centrality in the graph theory.

RESULTS

The results indicated that patients with BPD present with aberrant DMN connectivity compared to healthy controls. Over a year of psychotherapy, the patients with BPD showed both FC changes (decreasing nodal degree in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and increasing in other cingulate cortex regions) and behavioral improvement in their symptoms and substance use. There was also a significant positive association between the decreased nodal degree in regions of the dorsal cingulate cortex and a decrease in the score of the TAS-20 indicating difficulty in identifying feelings after psychotherapy.

CONCLUSION

In BPD, there is altered FC within the DMN and disruption in self-processing and emotion regulation. Psychotherapy may modify the DMN connectivity and that modification is associated with positive changes in BPD emotional symptoms.

Intracranial study in humans: Neural spectral changes during watching comedy movie of Charlie Chaplin

Humor plays a prominent role in our lives. Thus, understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms of humor is particularly important. Previous studies that investigated neural substrates of humor used functional MRI and to a lesser extent EEG. In the present study, we conducted intracranial recording in human patients, enabling us to obtain the signal with high temporal precision from within specific brain locations. Our analysis focused on the temporal lobe and the surrounding areas, the temporal lobe was most densely covered in our recording. Thirteen patients watched a fragment of a Charlie Chaplin movie. An independent group of healthy participants rated the same movie fragment, helping us to identify the most funny and the least funny frames of the movie. We compared neural activity occurring during the most funny and least funny frames across frequencies in the range of 1-170 Hz. The most funny compared to least funny parts of the movie were associated with activity modulation in the broadband high-gamma (70-170 Hz; mostly activation) and to a lesser extent gamma band (40-69Hz; activation) and low frequencies (1-12 Hz, delta, theta, alpha bands; mostly deactivation). With regard to regional specificity, we found three types of brain areas: (I) temporal pole, middle and inferior temporal gyrus (both anterior and posterior) in which there was both activation in the high-gamma/gamma bands and deactivation in low frequencies; (II) ventral part of the temporal lobe such as the fusiform gyrus, in which there was mostly deactivation the low frequencies; (III) posterior temporal cortex and its environment, such as the middle occipital and the temporo-parietal junction, in which there was activation in the high-gamma/gamma band. Overall, our results suggest that humor appreciation might be achieved by neural activity across the frequency spectrum.

Final-note expectancy and humor: an empirical investigation

Background

Melodic expectations were manipulated to investigate the nature of tonally incongruent melodic final notes that may elicit humor in listeners. To our knowledge, this is the first experiment aiming at studying humor elicitation in music with the use of empirical, quantitative methods. To this aim, we have based the experiment on the incongruency/resolution theory of humor and the violations of expectations in music. Our goal was to determine the amount of change, that is, the degree of incongruency required to elicit humor.

Methods

We composed two simple, 8-bar long melodies, and changed their final notes so that they could randomly finish on any semitone between an octave upwards and downwards with respect to the original, tonic final note. This resulted in 25 versions for both melodies, including the original final notes, for each semitone. Musician and non-musician participants rated each version of each melody on five 7-point bipolar scales according to goodness of fit, humor, beauty, playfulness, and pleasantness.

Results and conclusions

Our results showed that even a single change of the final note can elicit humor. No strong connection was found between humor elicitation and the level of incongruency (i.e., the amount of violation of expectation). Instead, changes to the major-mode melody were more likely to be found humorous than those to the minor-mode melody, implying that a so-called playful context is necessary for humor elicitation as the major melody was labelled playful by the listeners. Furthermore, final notes below the original tonic end note were also found to be less humorous and less fitting to the melodic context than those above it.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-022-00936-z.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging of the prefrontal cortex during a naturalistic comedy movie

Naturalistic stimulation (i.e., movies and auditory narratives of some minutes' length) has been a powerful approach to bringing more real-life experiences into laboratory experiments. Data-driven, intersubject correlation (ISC) analysis permits examining to what extent activity in a specific brain region correlates across participants during exposure to a naturalistic stimulus, as well as testing whether neural activity correlates with behavioral measures. Notably, most of the previous research with naturalistic stimuli was conducted using functional fMRI (fMRI). Here, we tested whether a naturalistic approach and the ISC are feasible using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) - the imaging method particularly suited for populations of patients and children. Fifty-three healthy adult participants watched twice a 3-min segment of a Charlie Chaplin movie while we recorded the brain activity on the surface of their prefrontal cortex using fNIRS. In addition, an independent group of 18 participants used a continuous scoring procedure to rate the extent to which they felt that different parts of the movie fragment were funny. Our two findings were as follows. First, we found higher-than-zero ISC in fNIRS signals in the prefrontal cortex lobes, a result that was particularly high in the oxygenated channels during the first repetition of the movie. Second, we found a significant negative correlation between oxygenated brain signals and ratings of the movie's humorousness. In a series of control analyses we demonstrated that this latter correlation could not be explained by various non-humor-related movie sensory properties (e.g., auditory volume and image brightness). The key overall outcome of the present study is that fNIRS in combination with the naturalistic paradigms and the ISC might be a sensitive and powerful research method to explore cognitive processing. Our results also suggest a potential role of the prefrontal cortex in humor appreciation.

Intense positive affect without arousal is possible: Subjective and physiological reactivity during a partnered sexual meditative experience

Though common models suggest that affect intensity can be thought of as orthogonal to arousal, examples of intensely pleasant low arousal stimuli remain rare. To support this orthogonal model, we examined whether a specific meditative sexual practice, Orgasmic Meditation (OM), induces such a state. Thus, this study measured changes in subjective affect as well as skin conductance responses (SCR), as a proxy for physiological arousal associated with sympathetic nervous system activity, during a single 15-minute partnered sexual meditative practice (Orgasmic Meditation; OM) in 93 participants. Almost all participants experienced sustained positive affect during the task. Whereas seconds after OM start approximately half the participants experienced sustained increased SCR, the other half experienced sustained decreased SCR. . This observation suggests that the experience of sustained positive affect in intimate interactions may be associated with multiple mechanistic profiles including both decreased and increased arousal.

Behavioral Experience-Sampling Methods in Neuroimaging Studies With Movie and Narrative Stimuli

Movies and narratives are increasingly utilized as stimuli in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalography (EEG) studies. Emotional reactions of subjects, what they pay attention to, what they memorize, and their cognitive interpretations are all examples of inner experiences that can differ between subjects during watching of movies and listening to narratives inside the scanner. Here, we review literature indicating that behavioral measures of inner experiences play an integral role in this new research paradigm via guiding neuroimaging analysis. We review behavioral methods that have been developed to sample inner experiences during watching of movies and listening to narratives. We also review approaches that allow for joint analyses of the behaviorally sampled inner experiences and neuroimaging data. We suggest that building neurophenomenological frameworks holds potential for solving the interrelationships between inner experiences and their neural underpinnings. Finally, we tentatively suggest that recent developments in machine learning approaches may pave way for inferring different classes of inner experiences directly from the neuroimaging data, thus potentially complementing the behavioral self-reports.

Classification of emotion categories based on functional connectivity patterns of the human brain

Neurophysiological and psychological models posit that emotions depend on connections across wide-spread corticolimbic circuits. While previous studies using pattern recognition on neuroimaging data have shown differences between various discrete emotions in brain activity patterns, less is known about the differences in functional connectivity. Thus, we employed multivariate pattern analysis on functional magnetic resonance imaging data (i) to develop a pipeline for applying pattern recognition in functional connectivity data, and (ii) to test whether connectivity patterns differ across emotion categories. Six emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral state were induced in 16 participants using one-minute-long emotional narratives with natural prosody while brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We computed emotion-wise connectivity matrices both for whole-brain connections and for 10 previously defined functionally connected brain subnetworks and trained an across-participant classifier to categorize the emotional states based on whole-brain data and for each subnetwork separately. The whole-brain classifier performed above chance level with all emotions except sadness, suggesting that different emotions are characterized by differences in large-scale connectivity patterns. When focusing on the connectivity within the 10 subnetworks, classification was successful within the default mode system and for all emotions. We thus show preliminary evidence for consistently different sustained functional connectivity patterns for instances of emotion categories particularly within the default mode system.

From Visual Perception to Aesthetic Appeal: Brain Responses to Aesthetically Appealing Natural Landscape Movies

During aesthetically appealing visual experiences, visual content provides a basis for computation of affectively tinged representations of aesthetic value. How this happens in the brain is largely unexplored. Using engaging video clips of natural landscapes, we tested whether cortical regions that respond to perceptual aspects of an environment (e.g., spatial layout, object content and motion) were directly modulated by rated aesthetic appeal. Twenty-four participants watched a series of videos of natural landscapes while being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and reported both continuous ratings of enjoyment (during the videos) and overall aesthetic judgments (after each video). Although landscape videos engaged a greater expanse of high-level visual cortex compared to that observed for images of landscapes, independently localized category-selective visual regions (e.g., scene-selective parahippocampal place area and motion-selective hMT+) were not significantly modulated by aesthetic appeal. Rather, a whole-brain analysis revealed modulations by aesthetic appeal in ventral (collateral sulcus) and lateral (middle occipital sulcus, posterior middle temporal gyrus) clusters that were adjacent to scene and motion selective regions. These findings suggest that aesthetic appeal per se is not represented in well-characterized feature- and category-selective regions of visual cortex. Rather, we propose that the observed activations reflect a local transformation from a feature-based visual representation to a representation of "elemental affect," computed through information-processing mechanisms that detect deviations from an observer's expectations. Furthermore, we found modulation by aesthetic appeal in subcortical reward structures but not in regions of the default-mode network (DMN) nor orbitofrontal cortex, and only weak evidence for associated changes in functional connectivity. In contrast to other visual aesthetic domains, aesthetically appealing interactions with natural landscapes may rely more heavily on comparisons between ongoing stimulation and well-formed representations of the natural world, and less on top-down processes for resolving ambiguities or assessing self-relevance.

Naturalistic Stimuli in Affective Neuroimaging: A Review

Naturalistic stimuli such as movies, music, and spoken and written stories elicit strong emotions and allow brain imaging of emotions in close-to-real-life conditions. Emotions are multi-component phenomena: relevant stimuli lead to automatic changes in multiple functional components including perception, physiology, behavior, and conscious experiences. Brain activity during naturalistic stimuli reflects all these changes, suggesting that parsing emotion-related processing during such complex stimulation is not a straightforward task. Here, I review affective neuroimaging studies that have employed naturalistic stimuli to study emotional processing, focusing especially on experienced emotions. I argue that to investigate emotions with naturalistic stimuli, we need to define and extract emotion features from both the stimulus and the observer.

Electrical brain activity and facial electromyography responses to irony in dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants

We studied irony comprehension and emotional reactions to irony in dysphoric and control participants. Electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG) were measured when spoken conversations were presented with pictures that provided either congruent (non-ironic) or incongruent (ironic) contexts. In a separate session, participants evaluated the congruency and valence of the stimuli. While both groups rated ironic stimuli funnier than non-ironic stimuli, the control group rated all the stimuli funnier than the dysphoric group. N400-like activity, P600, and EMG activity indicating smiling were larger after the ironic stimuli than the non-ironic stimuli for both groups. Further, in the dysphoric group the irony modulation was evident in the electrode cluster over the right hemisphere, while no such difference in lateralization was observed in the control group. The results suggest a depression-related alteration in the P600 response associated to irony comprehension, but no alterations were found in emotional reactivity specifically related to irony.

The moderating role of sensory processing sensitivity in the link between stress and depression: A VBM study

This study examined whether components of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) could moderate the effect of perceived stress on depressive symptoms and its neural substrates. In this study, 244 participants (181females) reported on their SPS, perceived stress, and experienced depressive symptoms, and subsequently underwent a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) to explore the neural basis of their SPS characteristics. Behavioral results showed that, compared with individuals low in EOE (i.e., ease of excitation, a sub-dimension of SPS), those high in EOE were more likely to report depressive symptoms under stress. The VBM analysis indicated that EOE was significantly positively correlated with gray matter (GM) volumes of right cerebellum and negatively correlated with GM volumes of right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (right dACC). Moreover, GM volumes of the two areas moderated the relation between stress and depression. These findings collectively suggest that the structural abnormalities in these regions might account for simulating and experiencing intense emotional reactions frequently among individuals with high EOE. Thus, the accumulation of these negative emotions in reaction to stress may lead to higher probabilities of experiencing depressive symptoms. Taken together, present study shed light on how stress interacted with sensory processing sensitivity to predict depression from the neural perspective.

Relationship-specific Encoding of Social Touch in Somatosensory and Insular Cortices

Humans use touch to maintain their social relationships, and the emotional qualities of touch depend on who touches whom. However, it is not known how affective and social dimensions of touch are processed in the brain. We measured haemodynamic brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 19 subjects (10 males), while they were touched on their upper thigh by either their romantic partner, or an unfamiliar female or male confederate or saw the hand of one of these individuals near their upper thigh but were not touched. We used multi-voxel pattern analysis on pre-defined regions of interest to reveal areas that encode social touch in a relationship-specific manner. The accuracy of the machine learning classifier to identify actor for both feeling touch and seeing hand exceeded the chance level in the primary somatosensory cortex, while in the insular cortex accuracy was above chance level only for the touch condition. When classifying the relationship (partner or stranger), while keeping the toucher sex fixed, amygdala (AMYG), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and primary and secondary somatosensory cortices were able to discriminate toucher significantly above chance level. These results suggest that information on the social relationship of the toucher is processed consistently across several regions. More complex information about toucher identity is processed in the primary somatosensory and insular cortices, both of which can be considered early sensory areas.

Acceptance-Based Emotion Regulation Reduces Subjective and Physiological Pain Responses

Acceptance-based regulation of pain, which focuses on the allowing of pain and pain related thoughts and emotions, was found to modulate pain. However, results so far are inconsistent regarding different pain modalities and indices. Moreover, studies so far often lack a suitable control condition, focus on behavioral pain measures rather than physiological correlates, and often use between-subject designs, which potentially impede the evaluation of the effectiveness of the strategies. Therefore, we investigated whether acceptance-based strategies can reduce subjective and physiological markers of acute pain in comparison to a control condition in a within-subject design. To this end, participants (N = 30) completed 24 trials comprising 10 s of heat pain stimulation. Each trial started with a cue instructing participants to welcome and experience pain (acceptance trials) or to react to the pain as it is without employing any regulation strategies (control trials). In addition to pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings, heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) were recorded. Results showed significantly decreased pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings for acceptance compared to control trials. Additionally, HR was significantly lower during acceptance compared to control trials, whereas SC revealed no significant differences. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of acceptance-based strategies in reducing subjective and physiological pain responses relative to a control condition, even after short training. Therefore, the systematic investigation of acceptance in different pain modalities in healthy and chronic pain patients is warranted.

Decoding dynamic affective responses to naturalistic videos with shared neural patterns

This study explored the feasibility of using shared neural patterns from brief affective episodes (viewing affective pictures) to decode extended, dynamic affective sequences in a naturalistic experience (watching movie-trailers). Twenty-eight participants viewed pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and, in a separate session, watched various movie-trailers. We first located voxels at bilateral occipital cortex (LOC) responsive to affective picture categories by GLM analysis, then performed between-subject hyperalignment on the LOC voxels based on their responses during movie-trailer watching. After hyperalignment, we trained between-subject machine learning classifiers on the affective pictures, and used the classifiers to decode affective states of an out-of-sample participant both during picture viewing and during movie-trailer watching. Within participants, neural classifiers identified valence and arousal categories of pictures, and tracked self-reported valence and arousal during video watching. In aggregate, neural classifiers produced valence and arousal time series that tracked the dynamic ratings of the movie-trailers obtained from a separate sample. Our findings provide further support for the possibility of using pre-trained neural representations to decode dynamic affective responses during a naturalistic experience.

Changes in brain activity following the voluntary control of empathy

In neuroscience, empathy is often conceived as relatively automatic. The voluntary control that people can exert on brain mechanisms that map the emotions of others onto our own emotions has received comparatively less attention. Here, we therefore measured brain activity while participants watched emotional Hollywood movies under two different instructions: to rate the main characters' emotions by empathizing with them, or to do so while keeping a detached perspective. We found that participants yielded highly consistent and similar ratings of emotions under both conditions. Using intersubject correlation-based analyses we found that, when encouraged to empathize, participants' brain activity in limbic (including cingulate and putamen) and somatomotor regions (including premotor, SI and SII) synchronized more during the movie than when encouraged to detach. Using intersubject functional connectivity we found that comparing the empathic and detached perspectives revealed widespread increases in functional connectivity between large scale networks. Our findings contribute to the increasing awareness that we have voluntary control over the neural mechanisms through which we process the emotions of others.

Overanxious and underslept

Are you feeling anxious? Did you sleep poorly last night? Sleep disruption is a recognized feature of all anxiety disorders. Here, we investigate the basic brain mechanisms underlying the anxiogenic impact of sleep loss. Additionally, we explore whether subtle, societally common reductions in sleep trigger elevated next-day anxiety. Finally, we examine what it is about sleep, physiologically, that provides such an overnight anxiety-reduction benefit. We demonstrate that the anxiogenic impact of sleep loss is linked to impaired medial prefrontal cortex activity and associated connectivity with extended limbic regions. In contrast, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) slow-wave oscillations offer an ameliorating, anxiolytic benefit on these brain networks following sleep. Of societal relevance, we establish that even modest night-to-night reductions in sleep across the population predict consequential day-to-day increases in anxiety. These findings help contribute to an emerging framework explaining the intimate link between sleep and anxiety and further highlight the prospect of non-rapid eye movement sleep as a therapeutic target for meaningfully reducing anxiety.

Continuous ratings of movie watching reveal idiosyncratic dynamics of aesthetic enjoyment

Visual aesthetic experiences unfold over time, yet most of our understanding of such experiences comes from experiments using static visual stimuli and measuring static responses. Here, we investigated the temporal dynamics of subjective aesthetic experience using temporally extended stimuli (movie clips) in combination with continuous behavioral ratings. Two groups of participants, a rate group (n = 25) and a view group (n = 25), watched 30-second video clips of landscapes and dance performances in test and retest blocks. The rate group reported continuous ratings while watching the videos, with an overall aesthetic judgment at the end of each video, in both test and retest blocks. The view group, however, passively watched the videos in the test block, reporting only an overall aesthetic judgment at the end of each clip. In the retest block, the view group reported both continuous and overall judgments. When comparing the two groups, we found that the task of making continuous ratings did not influence overall ratings or agreement across participants. In addition, the degree of temporal variation in continuous ratings over time differed substantially by observer (from slower “integrators” to “fast responders”), but less so by video. Reliability of continuous ratings across repeated exposures was in general high, but also showed notable variance across participants. Together, these results show that temporally extended stimuli produce aesthetic experiences that are not the same from person to person, and that continuous behavioral ratings provide a reliable window into the temporal dynamics of such aesthetic experiences while not materially altering the experiences themselves.

The neural underpinnings of music listening under different attention conditions

Most studies examining the neural underpinnings of music listening have no specific instruction on how to process the presented musical pieces. In this study, we explicitly manipulated the participants' focus of attention while they listened to the musical pieces. We used an ecologically valid experimental setting by presenting the musical stimuli simultaneously with naturalistic film sequences. In one condition, the participants were instructed to focus their attention on the musical piece (attentive listening), whereas in the second condition, the participants directed their attention to the film sequence (passive listening). We used two instrumental musical pieces: an electronic pop song, which was a major hit at the time of testing, and a classical musical piece. During music presentation, we measured electroencephalographic oscillations and responses from the autonomic nervous system (heart rate and high-frequency heart rate variability). During passive listening to the pop song, we found strong event-related synchronizations in all analyzed frequency bands (theta, lower alpha, upper alpha, lower beta, and upper beta). The neurophysiological responses during attentive listening to the pop song were similar to those of the classical musical piece during both listening conditions. Thus, the focus of attention had a strong influence on the neurophysiological responses to the pop song, but not on the responses to the classical musical piece. The electroencephalographic responses during passive listening to the pop song are interpreted as a neurophysiological and psychological state typically observed when the participants are 'drawn into the music'.

Lost in music: Neural signature of pleasure and its role in modulating attentional resources

We investigated the neural correlates of pleasure induced by listening to highly pleasant and neutral musical excerpts using electroencephalography (EEG). Power spectrum analysis of EEG data showed a distinct gradual change in the power of low-frequency oscillations in response to highly pleasant, but not neutral, musical excerpts. Specifically, listening to highly pleasant music was associated with (i) relatively higher oscillatory activity in the theta band over the frontocentral (FC) area and in the alpha band over the parieto-occipital area, and (ii) a gradual increase in the oscillatory power over time. Correlation analysis between behavioral and electrophysiological data revealed that theta power over the FC electrodes was correlated with subjective assessment of pleasantness while listening to music. To study the link between attention and positive valence in our experiments, volunteers performed a delayed match-to-sample memory task while listening to the musical excerpts. The subjects' performances were significantly lower under highly pleasant conditions compared to neutral conditions. Listening to pleasant music requires higher degrees of attention, leading to the observed decline in memory performance. Gradual development of low-frequency oscillations in the frontal and posterior areas may be at least partly due to gradual recruitment of higher levels of attention over time in response to pleasurable music.

The impact of self-distancing on emotion explosiveness and accumulation: An fMRI study

Emotions unfold over time with episodes differing in explosiveness (i.e., profiles having a steep vs. a gentle start) and accumulation (i.e., profiles increasing over time vs. going back to baseline). In the present fMRI study, we wanted to replicate and extend previous findings on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Specifically, we aimed to: (a) replicate the finding that different neural mechanisms are associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation, (b) replicate the finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective decreases emotion explosiveness and accumulation at the level of self-report, and (c) examine whether adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective similarly modulates activity in the brain regions associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Participants in an fMRI scanner were asked to adopt a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective while reading and thinking about negative social feedback, and to report on felt changes in negative affect during that period using an emotion intensity profile tracking approach. We replicated previous findings showing that emotion explosiveness and accumulation were related to activity in regions involved in self-referential processing (such as the medial prefrontal cortex) and sustained visceral arousal (such as the posterior insula), respectively. The finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective lowers emotion explosiveness and accumulation was also replicated at a self-report level. However, perspective taking did not impact activity in the neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation.

Suppressing the Chills: Effects of Musical Manipulation on the Chills Response

Research on musical chills has linked the response to multiple musical features; however, there exists no study that has attempted to manipulate musical stimuli to enable causal inferences, meaning current understanding is based mainly on correlational evidence. In the current study, participants who regularly experience chills (N = 24) listened to an original and manipulated version of three pieces reported to elicit chills in a previous survey. Predefined chills sections were removed to create manipulated conditions. The effects of these manipulations on the chills response were assessed through continuous self-reports, and skin conductance measurements. Results show that chills were significantly less frequent following stimulus manipulation across all three pieces. Continuous measurements of chills intensity were significantly higher in the chills sections compared with control sections in the pieces; similar patterns were found for phasic skin conductance, although some differences emerged. Continuous measurements also correlated with psychoacoustic features such as loudness, brightness and roughness in two of the three pieces. Findings are discussed in terms of understanding structural and acoustic features and chills experiences within their local music contexts, the necessity of experimental approaches to musical chills, and the possibility of different features activating different underlying mechanisms.

Humor Appreciation Involves Parametric and Synchronized Activity in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Hippocampus

Humor perception is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human societies. In theories of humor perception, three factors, non-seriousness, social context, and incongruity, have been implicated in humor. In another theory, however, elaboration and reinterpretation of contexts are considered to play a role in eliciting humor. Although the neural correlates of humor appreciation have been investigated using neuroimaging methods, only a few studies have conducted such experiments under natural conditions. In the present study, two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, using a comedy movie as a stimulus, were conducted to investigate the neural correlates of humor under natural conditions. The subjects' brain activity was measured while watching and enjoying a movie. In experiment 1, a parametric analysis showed that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and hippocampus/amygdala had a positive relationship with the subjective rating of funniness. In experiment 2, intersubject correlation was analyzed to investigate synchronized activity across all participants. Signal synchronization that paralleled increased funniness ratings was observed in the MPFC and hippocampus. Thus, it appears that both parametric and synchronized activity in the MPFC and hippocampus are important during humor appreciation. The present study has revealed the brain regions that are predominantly involved in humor sensation under natural condition.

Writing About Past Failures Attenuates Cortisol Responses and Sustained Attention Deficits Following Psychosocial Stress

Acute stress can harm performance. Paradoxically, writing about stressful events—such as past failures—has been shown to improve cognitive functioning and performance, especially in tasks that require sustained attention. Yet, there is little physiological evidence for whether writing about past failures or other negative events improves performance by reducing stress. In this experiment, we studied the effects of an acute psychosocial stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test, on attentional performance and salivary cortisol release in humans. Additionally, we investigated whether an expressive writing task could reduce the detrimental effects of stress, both on performance and physiological response. We found that when individuals were asked to write about a past failure before experiencing a stressor, they exhibited attenuated stress responses. Moreover, those who wrote about a past failure before being exposed to stress also exhibited better behavioral performance. Our results suggest that writing about a previous failure may allow an individual to experience a new stressor as less stressful, reducing its physiological and behavioral effects.

The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Acute and Chronic Pain

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a functionally and structurally heterogeneous region and a key node of several brain networks, implicated in cognitive, affective, and sensory processing. As such, the DLPFC is commonly activated in experimental pain studies, and shows abnormally increased function in chronic pain populations. Furthermore, several studies have shown that some chronic pains are associated with decreased left DLPFC gray matter and that successful interventions can reverse this structural abnormality. In addition, studies have indicated that noninvasive stimulation of the left DLPFC effectively treats some chronic pains. In this article, we review the neuroimaging literature regarding the role of the DLPFC and its potential as a therapeutic target for chronic pain conditions, including studies showing the involvement of the DLPFC in encoding and modulating acute pain and studies demonstrating the reversal of DLPFC functional and structural abnormalities after successful interventions for chronic pain. We also review studies of noninvasive brain stimulation of the DLPFC showing acute pain modulation and some effectiveness as a treatment for certain chronic pain conditions. We further discuss the network architecture of the DLPFC, and postulate mechanisms by which DLPFC stimulation alleviates chronic pain. Future work testing these mechanisms will allow for more effective therapies.

PERSPECTIVE

The structure and function of the DLPFC is abnormal in some chronic pain conditions. Upon successful resolution of pain, these abnormalities are reversed. Understanding the underlying mechanisms and the role of this region can lead to the development of an effective therapeutic target for some chronic pain conditions.

The neural basis of emotions varies over time: different regions go with onset- and offset-bound processes underlying emotion intensity

According to theories of emotion dynamics, emotions unfold across two phases in which different types of processes come to the fore: emotion onset and emotion offset. Differences in onset-bound processes are reflected by the degree of explosiveness or steepness of the response at onset, and differences in offset-bound processes by the degree of accumulation or intensification of the subsequent response. Whether onset- and offset-bound processes have distinctive neural correlates and, hence, whether the neural basis of emotions varies over time, still remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we address this question using a recently developed paradigm that allows to disentangle explosiveness and accumulation. Thirty-one participants were exposed to neutral and negative social feedback, and asked to reflect on its contents. Emotional intensity while reading and thinking about the feedback was measured with an intensity profile tracking approach. Using non-negative matrix factorization, the resulting profile data were decomposed in explosiveness and accumulation components, which were subsequently entered as continuous regressors of the BOLD response. It was found that the neural basis of emotion intensity shifts as emotions unfold over time with emotion explosiveness and accumulation having distinctive neural correlates.

Task Context Influences Brain Activation during Music Listening

In this paper, we examined brain activation in subjects during two music listening conditions: listening while simultaneously rating the musical piece being played [Listening and Rating (LR)] and listening to the musical pieces unconstrained [Listening (L)]. Using these two conditions, we tested whether the sequence in which the two conditions were fulfilled influenced the brain activation observable during the L condition (LR → L or L → LR). We recorded high-density EEG during the playing of four well-known positively experienced soundtracks in two subject groups. One group started with the L condition and continued with the LR condition (L → LR); the second group performed this experiment in reversed order (LR → L). We computed from the recorded EEG the power for different frequency bands (theta, lower alpha, upper alpha, lower beta, and upper beta). Statistical analysis revealed that the power in all examined frequency bands increased during the L condition but only when the subjects had not had previous experience with the LR condition (i.e., L → LR). For the subjects who began with the LR condition, there were no power increases during the L condition. Thus, the previous experience with the LR condition prevented subjects from developing the particular mental state associated with the typical power increase in all frequency bands. The subjects without previous experience of the LR condition listened to the musical pieces in an unconstrained and undisturbed manner and showed a general power increase in all frequency bands. We interpret the fact that unconstrained music listening was associated with increased power in all examined frequency bands as a neural indicator of a mental state that can best be described as a mind-wandering state during which the subjects are “drawn into” the music.

Neural circuit of verbal humor comprehension in schizophrenia - an fMRI study

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit problems with understanding the figurative meaning of language. This study evaluates neural correlates of diminished humor comprehension observed in schizophrenia. The study included chronic schizophrenia (SCH) outpatients (n = 20), and sex, age and education level matched healthy controls (n = 20). The fMRI punchline based humor comprehension task consisted of 60 stories of which 20 had funny, 20 nonsensical and 20 neutral (not funny) punchlines. After the punchlines were presented, the participants were asked to indicate whether the story was comprehensible and how funny it was. Three contrasts were analyzed in both groups reflecting stages of humor processing: abstract vs neutral stories - incongruity detection; funny vs abstract - incongruity resolution and elaboration; and funny vs neutral - complete humor processing. Additionally, parametric modulation analysis was performed using both subjective ratings separately. Between-group comparisons revealed that the SCH subjects had attenuated activation in the right posterior superior temporal gyrus (BA 41) in case of irresolvable incongruity processing of nonsensical puns; in the left dorsomedial middle and superior frontal gyri (BA 8/9) in case of incongruity resolution and elaboration processing of funny puns; and in the interhemispheric dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 24) in case of complete processing of funny puns. Additionally, during comprehensibility ratings the SCH group showed a suppressed activity in the left dorsomedial middle and superior frontal gyri (BA 8/9) and revealed weaker activation during funniness ratings in the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (BA 24). Interestingly, these differences in the SCH group were accompanied behaviorally by a protraction of time in both types of rating responses and by indicating funny punchlines less comprehensible. Summarizing, our results indicate neural substrates of humor comprehension processing impairments in schizophrenia, which is accompanied by fronto-temporal hypoactivation.

Lost emotion: Disrupted brain-based tracking of dynamic affective episodes in anxiety and depression

In our day-to-day lives we are confronted with dynamic sensory inputs that elicit a continuously evolving emotional response. Insight into the brain basis of the dynamic nature of emotional reactivity may be critical for understanding chronic symptoms of anxiety and depression. Here, individuals with generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and healthy controls watched a video with dynamic affective content while fMRI activity was recorded. Across all participants there was a large-scale tracking of affective content in emotion processing regions and the default mode network. Anxious and depressed individuals displayed less brain-based coupling within these regions and the extent of this uncoupling correlated with variability in emotional numbing. Thus, abnormal neural tracking of affective information during dynamic emotional episodes appears to represent a disconnection between affective cues in the environment and an individual's response to these cues-providing a putative neural basis for context insensitive affective reactivity and emotional numbing.

Context matters: Anterior and posterior cortical midline responses to sad movie scenes

Narrative movies can create powerful emotional responses. While recent research has advanced the understanding of neural networks involved in immersive movie viewing, their modulation within a movie's dynamic context remains inconclusive. In this study, 24 healthy participants passively watched sad scene climaxes taken from 24 romantic comedies, while brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI). To study effects of context, the sad scene climaxes were presented with either coherent scene context, replaced non-coherent context or without context. In a second viewing, the same clips were rated continuously for sadness. The ratings varied over time with peaks of experienced sadness within the assumed climax intervals. Activations in anterior and posterior cortical midline regions increased if presented with both coherent and replaced context, while activation in the temporal gyri decreased. This difference was more pronounced for the coherent context condition. Psycho-Physiological interactions (PPI) analyses showed a context-dependent coupling of midline regions with occipital visual and sub-cortical reward regions. Our results demonstrate the pivotal role of midline structures and their interaction with perceptual and reward areas in processing contextually embedded socio-emotional information in movies.

Missed losses loom larger than missed gains: Electrodermal reactivity to decision choices and outcomes in a gambling task

Loss aversion is a defining characteristic of prospect theory, whereby responses are stronger to losses than to equivalently sized gains (Kahneman & Tversky Econometrica, 47, 263-291, 1979). By monitoring electrodermal activity (EDA) during a gambling task, in this study we examined physiological activity during risky decisions, as well as to both obtained (e.g., gains and losses) and counterfactual (e.g., narrowly missed gains and losses) outcomes. During the bet selection phase, EDA increased linearly with bet size, highlighting the role of somatic signals in decision-making under uncertainty in a task without any learning requirement. Outcome-related EDA scaled with the magnitudes of monetary wins and losses, and losses had a stronger impact on EDA than did equivalently sized wins. Narrowly missed wins (i.e., near-wins) and narrowly missed losses (i.e., near-losses) also evoked EDA responses, and the change of EDA as a function of the size of the missed outcome was modestly greater for near-losses than for near-wins, suggesting that near-losses have more impact on subjective value than do near-wins. Across individuals, the slope for choice-related EDA (as a function of bet size) correlated with the slope for outcome-related EDA as a function of both the obtained and counterfactual outcome magnitudes, and these correlations were stronger for loss and near-loss conditions than for win and near-win conditions. Taken together, these asymmetrical EDA patterns to objective wins and losses, as well as to near-wins and near-losses, provide a psychophysiological instantiation of the value function curve in prospect theory, which is steeper in the negative than in the positive domain.

Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies-narrational structure and how it impacts us-to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts-setup, complication, development, and climax-with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated stylistic dimensions of movies and can litigate among theories of movie structure. In general, movie narratives have roughly the same structure as narratives in any other domain-plays, novels, manga, folktales, even oral histories-but with particular runtime constraints, cadences, and constructions that are unique to the medium.

A studyforrest extension, simultaneous fMRI and eye gaze recordings during prolonged natural stimulation

Here we present an update of the studyforrest (http://studyforrest.org) dataset that complements the previously released functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data for natural language processing with a new two-hour 3 Tesla fMRI acquisition while 15 of the original participants were shown an audio-visual version of the stimulus motion picture. We demonstrate with two validation analyses that these new data support modeling specific properties of the complex natural stimulus, as well as a substantial within-subject BOLD response congruency in brain areas related to the processing of auditory inputs, speech, and narrative when compared to the existing fMRI data for audio-only stimulation. In addition, we provide participants' eye gaze location as recorded simultaneously with fMRI, and an additional sample of 15 control participants whose eye gaze trajectories for the entire movie were recorded in a lab setting—to enable studies on attentional processes and comparative investigations on the potential impact of the stimulation setting on these processes.

Brain hemodynamic activity during viewing and re-viewing of comedy movies explained by experienced humor

Humor is crucial in human social interactions. To study the underlying neural processes, three comedy clips were shown twice to 20 volunteers during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Inter-subject similarities in humor ratings, obtained immediately after fMRI, explained inter-subject correlation of hemodynamic activity in right frontal pole and in a number of other brain regions. General linear model analysis also indicated activity in right frontal pole, as well as in additional cortical areas and subcortically in striatum, explained by humorousness. The association of the right frontal pole with experienced humorousness is a novel finding, which might be related to humor unfolding over longer time scales in the movie clips. Specifically, frontal pole has been shown to exhibit longer temporal receptive windows than, e.g., sensory areas, which might have enabled processing of humor in the clips based on holding information and reinterpreting that in light of new information several (even tens of) seconds later. As another novel finding, medial and lateral prefrontal areas, frontal pole, posterior-inferior temporal areas, posterior parietal areas, posterior cingulate, striatal structures and amygdala showed reduced activity upon re-viewing of the clips, suggesting involvement in processing of humor related to novelty of the comedic events.

Links among emotional awareness, somatic awareness and autonomic homeostatic processing

Emotional awareness and somatic interoceptive awareness are essential processes for human psychosomatic health. A typical trait of lacking emotional awareness related to psychosomatic symptoms is alexithymia. In contrast, alexisomia refers to the trait of lacking somatic awareness. Links between emotional and somatic awareness and homeostatic processing are also significant for the psychosomatic health. The purpose of the present paper is to review the links among emotional awareness, somatic interoceptive awareness and autonomic homeostatic processing. On the basis of the collected evidence, the following arguments were presented¹: (1) The main subcortical neural substrates for these processes are limbic-related systems, which are also responsible for autonomic functions for optimization of homeostatic efficiency. (2) Considerable studies have shown that autonomic activity and/or reactivity to stress correlate with both emotional and interoceptive awareness. A hypothesis was advocated about the links between the two types of awareness and autonomic function: Autonomic dysfunction, especially high sympathetic tone at baseline and/or attenuated reactivity or variability to stress, appears to be involved in disturbance of emotional and interoceptive awareness. (3) Several studies suggest that a link or a cooperative relationship exists between emotional and somatic awareness, and that somatic awareness is the more fundamental of the two types of awareness. Emotional awareness, somatic awareness and autonomic homeostatic processing generally occur in parallel or concurrently. However, some complex features of pathologies include coexistence of reduced interoceptive awareness and somatosensory amplification. The autonomic homeostatic process is fundamentally involved in emotional and somatic awareness. Investigation of these types of awareness with both neuroimaging evaluations and estimation of peripheral autonomic function are required as next steps for exploration of the relationship between awareness and human somatic states including somatic symptoms as well as general psychosomatic health.

The neural networks of subjectively evaluated emotional conflicts

Previous work on the neural underpinnings of emotional conflict processing has largely focused on designs that instruct participants to ignore a distracter which conflicts with a target. In contrast, this study investigated the noninstructed experience and evaluation of an emotional conflict, where positive or negative cues can be subjectively prioritized. To this end, healthy participants freely watched short film scenes that evoked emotional conflicts while their BOLD responses were measured. Participants' individual ratings of conflict and valence perception during the film scenes were collected immediately afterwards, and the individual ratings were regressed against the BOLD data. Our analyses revealed that (a) amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex were significantly involved in prioritizing positive or negative cues, but not in subjective evaluations of conflict per se, and (b) superior temporal sulcus (STS) and inferior parietal lobule (IPL), which have been implicated in social cognition and emotion control, were involved in both prioritizing positive or negative cues and subjectively evaluating conflict, and may thus constitute "hubs" or "switches" in emotional conflict processing. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analyses further revealed stronger functional connectivity between IPL and ventral prefrontal-medial parietal areas in prioritizing negative cues, and stronger connectivity between STS and dorsal-rostral prefrontal-medial parietal areas in prioritizing positive cues. In sum, our results suggest that IPL and STS are important in the subjective evaluation of complex conflicts and influence valence prioritization via prefrontal and parietal control centers. Hum Brain Mapp 37:2234-2246, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cerebral Correlates of Emotional and Action Appraisals During Visual Processing of Emotional Scenes Depending on Spatial Frequency: A Pilot Study

Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the type of cognitive appraisal involved. The present fMRI pilot study aimed to investigate the cerebral correlates involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes in two tasks, one emotional, based on the appraisal of personal emotional experience, and the other motivational, based on the appraisal of the tendency to action. Given that the use of spatial frequency information is relatively flexible during the visual processing of emotional stimuli depending on the task’s demands, we also explored the effect of the type of spatial frequency in visual stimuli in each task by using emotional scenes filtered in low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequencies (HSF). Activation was observed in the visual areas of the fusiform gyrus for all emotional scenes in both tasks, and in the amygdala for unpleasant scenes only. The motivational task induced additional activation in frontal motor-related areas (e.g. premotor cortex, SMA) and parietal regions (e.g. superior and inferior parietal lobules). Parietal regions were recruited particularly during the motivational appraisal of approach in response to pleasant scenes. These frontal and parietal activations, respectively, suggest that motor and navigation processes play a specific role in the identification of the tendency to action in the motivational task. Furthermore, activity observed in the motivational task, in response to both pleasant and unpleasant scenes, was significantly greater for HSF than for LSF scenes, suggesting that the tendency to action is driven mainly by the detailed information contained in scenes. Results for the emotional task suggest that spatial frequencies play only a small role in the evaluation of unpleasant and pleasant emotions. Our preliminary study revealed a partial distinction between visual processing of emotional scenes during identification of the tendency to action, and during identification of personal emotional experiences. It also illustrates flexible use of the spatial frequencies contained in scenes depending on their emotional valence and on task demands.

The reliability of continuous brain responses during naturalistic listening to music

Low-level (timbral) and high-level (tonal and rhythmical) musical features during continuous listening to music, studied by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have been shown to elicit large-scale responses in cognitive, motor, and limbic brain networks. Using a similar methodological approach and a similar group of participants, we aimed to study the replicability of previous findings. Participants' fMRI responses during continuous listening of a tango Nuevo piece were correlated voxelwise against the time series of a set of perceptually validated musical features computationally extracted from the music. The replicability of previous results and the present study was assessed by two approaches: (a) correlating the respective activation maps, and (b) computing the overlap of active voxels between datasets at variable levels of ranked significance. Activity elicited by timbral features was better replicable than activity elicited by tonal and rhythmical ones. These results indicate more reliable processing mechanisms for low-level musical features as compared to more high-level features. The processing of such high-level features is probably more sensitive to the state and traits of the listeners, as well as of their background in music.

Time course of EEG oscillations during repeated listening of a well-known aria

While previous studies have analyzed mean neurophysiological responses to musical stimuli, the current study aimed to identify specific time courses of electroencephalography (EEG) oscillations, which are associated with dynamic changes in the acoustic features of the musical stimulus. In addition, we were interested in whether these time courses change during a repeated presentation of the same musical piece. A total of 16 subjects repeatedly listened to the well-known aria “Nessun dorma,” sung by Paul Potts, while continuous 128-channel EEG and heart rate, as well as electrodermal responses, were recorded. The time courses for the EEG oscillations were calculated using a time resolution of 1 second for several frequency bands, on the basis of individual alpha-peak frequencies (theta, low alpha-1, low alpha-2, upper alpha, and beta). For all frequency bands, we identified a more or less continuous increase in power relative to a baseline period, indicating strong event-related synchronization (ERS) during music listening. The ERS time courses, however, did not correlate strongly with the time courses of the acoustic features of the aria. In addition, we did not observe changes in EEG oscillations after repeated presentation of the same musical piece. Aside from this distinctive feature, we identified a remarkable variability in EEG oscillations, both within and between the repeated presentations of the aria. We interpret the continuous increase in ERS observed in all frequency bands during music listening as an indicator of a particular neurophysiological and psychological state evoked by music listening. We suggest that this state is characterized by increased internal attention (accompanied by reduced external attention), increased inhibition of brain networks not involved in the generation of this internal state, the maintenance of a particular level of general alertness, and a type of brain state that can be described as “mind wandering.” The overall state can be categorized as a psychological process that may be seen as a “drawing in” to the musical piece. However, this state is not stable and varies considerably throughout the music listening session and across subjects. Most important, however, is the finding that the neurophysiological activations occurring during music listening are dynamic and not stationary.

The Subjective Experience of Pain: An FMRI Study of Percept-Related Models and Functional Connectivity

OBJECTIVE

Previous work suggests that the perception of pain is subjective and dependent on individual differences in physiological, emotional, and cognitive states. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) studies have used both stimulus-related (nociceptive properties) and percept-related (subjective experience of pain) models to identify the brain networks associated with pain. Our objective was to identify the network involved in processing subjective pain during cold stimuli.

METHODS

The current FMRI study directly contrasted a stimulus-related model with a percept-related model during blocks of cold pain stimuli in healthy adults. Specifically, neuronal activation was modelled as a function of changes in stimulus intensity vs as a function of increasing/decreasing levels of subjective pain corresponding to changes in pain ratings. In addition, functional connectivity analyses were conducted to examine intrinsic correlations between three proposed subnetworks (sensory/discriminative, affective/motivational, and cognitive/evaluative) involved in pain processing.

RESULTS

The percept-related model captured more extensive activation than the stimulus-related model and demonstrated an association between higher subjective pain and activation in expected cortical (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex [dACC] extending into pre-supplementary motor area) and subcortical (thalamus, striatum) areas. Moreover, connectivity results supported the posited roles of dACC and insula as key relay sites during neural processing of subjective pain. In particular, anterior insula appeared to link sensory/discriminative regions with regions in the other subnetworks, and dACC appeared to serve as a hub for affective/motivational, cognitive/evaluative, and motor subnetworks.

CONCLUSIONS

Using a percept-related model, brain regions involved in the processing of subjective pain during the application of cold stimuli were identified. Connectivity analyses identified linkages between key subnetworks involved in processing subjective pain.

Discrete Neural Signatures of Basic Emotions

Categorical models of emotions posit neurally and physiologically distinct human basic emotions. We tested this assumption by using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to classify brain activity patterns of 6 basic emotions (disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise) in 3 experiments. Emotions were induced with short movies or mental imagery during functional magnetic resonance imaging. MVPA accurately classified emotions induced by both methods, and the classification generalized from one induction condition to another and across individuals. Brain regions contributing most to the classification accuracy included medial and inferior lateral prefrontal cortices, frontal pole, precentral and postcentral gyri, precuneus, and posterior cingulate cortex. Thus, specific neural signatures across these regions hold representations of different emotional states in multimodal fashion, independently of how the emotions are induced. Similarity of subjective experiences between emotions was associated with similarity of neural patterns for the same emotions, suggesting a direct link between activity in these brain regions and the subjective emotional experience.