Bodily maps of emotions Nummenmaa, Lauri; Glerean, Enrico; Hari, Riitta ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2014, Letnik:
111, Številka:
2
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Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different ...emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.
Maps of subjective feelings Nummenmaa, Lauri; Hari, Riitta; Hietanen, Jari K. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
09/2018, Letnik:
115, Številka:
37
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Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life. We defined the organization and determinants of a feeling space involving 100 core feelings that ranged from cognitive and affective processes ...to somatic sensations and common illnesses. The feeling space was determined by a combination of basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis. A total of 1,026 participants took part in online surveys where we assessed (i) for each feeling, the intensity of four hypothesized basic dimensions (mental experience, bodily sensation, emotion, and controllability), (ii) subjectively experienced similarity of the 100 feelings, and (iii) topography of bodily sensations associated with each feeling. Neural similarity between a subset of the feeling states was derived from the NeuroSynth meta-analysis database based on the data from 9,821 brain-imaging studies. All feelings were emotionally valenced and the saliency of bodily sensations correlated with the saliency of mental experiences associated with each feeling. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction revealed five feeling clusters: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states and illnesses, and homeostatic states. Organization of the feeling space was best explained by basic dimensions of emotional valence, mental experiences, and bodily sensations. Subjectively felt similarity of feelingswas associated with basic feeling dimensions and the topography of the corresponding bodily sensations. These findings reveal a map of subjective feelings that are categorical, emotional, and embodied.
•Naturalistic stimuli provide powerful stimuli for neuroimaging studies.•Temporal-receptive windows and event-segmentation are vital short-term memory mechanisms.•Suspense and perspective taking ...disclose fundamental attentional mechanisms in the brain.•Emotions can be classified based on distributed patterns of brain activity.•A priori information robustly influences how the brain processes social interactions.
Using movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in human neuroimaging studies has yielded significant advances in understanding of cognitive and emotional functions. The relevant literature was reviewed, with emphasis on how the use of naturalistic stimuli has helped advance scientific understanding of human memory, attention, language, emotions, and social cognition in ways that would have been difficult otherwise. These advances include discovering a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, which supports processing of dynamic information that accumulates over several time scales, such as immediate reactions vs. slowly emerging patterns in social interactions. Naturalistic stimuli have also helped elucidate how the hippocampus supports segmentation and memorization of events in day-to-day life and have afforded insights into attentional brain mechanisms underlying our ability to adopt specific perspectives during natural viewing. Further, neuroimaging studies with naturalistic stimuli have revealed the role of the default-mode network in narrative-processing and in social cognition. Finally, by robustly eliciting genuine emotions, these stimuli have helped elucidate the brain basis of both basic and social emotions apparently manifested as highly overlapping yet distinguishable patterns of brain activity.
Nonhuman primates use social touch for maintenance and reinforcement of social structures, yet the role of social touch in human bonding in different reproductive, affiliative, and kinshipbased ...relationships remains unresolved. Here we reveal quantified, relationship-specific maps of bodily regions where social touch is allowed in a large cross-cultural dataset (N= 1,368 from Finland, France, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom). Participants were shown front and back silhouettes of human bodies with a word denoting one member of their social network. They were asked to color, on separate trials, the bodily regions where each individual in their social network would be allowed to touch them. Across all tested cultures, the total bodily area where touching was allowed was linearly dependent (meanr² = 0.54) on the emotional bond with the toucher, but independent of when that person was last encountered. Close acquaintances and family members were touched for more reasons than less familiar individuals. The bodily area others are allowed to touch thus represented, in a parametric fashion, the strength of the relationship- specific emotional bond. We propose that the spatial patterns of human social touch reflect an important mechanism supporting the maintenance of social bonds.
Two ongoing movements in human cognitive neuroscience have researchers shifting focus from group-level inferences to characterizing single subjects, and complementing tightly controlled tasks with ...rich, dynamic paradigms such as movies and stories. Yet relatively little work combines these two, perhaps because traditional analysis approaches for naturalistic imaging data are geared toward detecting shared responses rather than between-subject variability. Here, we review recent work using naturalistic stimuli to study individual differences, and advance a framework for detecting structure in idiosyncratic patterns of brain activity, or “idiosynchrony”. Specifically, we outline the emerging technique of inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA), including its theoretical motivation and an empirical demonstration of how it recovers brain-behavior relationships during movie watching using data from the Human Connectome Project. We also consider how stimulus choice may affect the individual signal and discuss areas for future research. We argue that naturalistic neuroimaging paradigms have the potential to reveal meaningful individual differences above and beyond those observed during traditional tasks or at rest.
•We review literature using naturalistic paradigms to study individual differences.•We discuss the phenomenon of idiosyncratic time-locked responses (“idiosynchrony”).•We outline inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA).•We apply IS-RSA to reveal brain-behavior relationships during movie watching.•We consider the role of stimulus selection and other directions for future work.
Graph‐theoretical methods have rapidly become a standard tool in studies of the structure and function of the human brain. Whereas the structural connectome can be fairly straightforwardly mapped ...onto a complex network, there are more degrees of freedom in constructing networks that represent functional connections between brain areas. For functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, such networks are typically built by aggregating the blood‐oxygen‐level dependent signal time series of voxels into larger entities (such as Regions of Interest in some brain atlas) and determining their connection strengths from some measure of time‐series correlations. Although it is evident that the outcome must be affected by how the voxel‐level time series are treated at the preprocessing stage, there is a lack of systematic studies of the effects of preprocessing on network structure. Here, we focus on the effects of spatial smoothing, a standard preprocessing method for fMRI. We apply various levels of spatial smoothing to resting‐state fMRI data and measure the changes induced in functional networks. We show that the level of spatial smoothing clearly affects the degrees and other centrality measures of functional network nodes; these changes are non‐uniform, systematic, and depend on the geometry of the brain. The composition of the largest connected network component is also affected in a way that artificially increases the similarity of the networks of different subjects. Our conclusion is that wherever possible, spatial smoothing should be avoided when preprocessing fMRI data for network analysis.
Spatial smoothing is commonly applied when preprocessing fMRI data for network‐oriented analyses. We show that smoothing has unexpected effects on the structure of the obtained functional brain networks, including an increased number of short links and changes in the identity of network hubs. These effects may affect the interpretation of the analysis outcomes, and therefore applying spatial smoothing should be avoided prior to network analysis whenever possible.
Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate understanding their intentions and actions. Here we show that networks of brain areas “tick together” in participants who are viewing similar emotional ...events in a movie. Participants’ brain activity was measured with functional MRI while they watched movies depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant emotions. After scanning, participants watched the movies again and continuously rated their experience of pleasantness–unpleasantness (i.e., valence) and of arousal–calmness. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to derive multisubject voxelwise similarity measures intersubject correlations (ISCs) of functional MRI data. Valence and arousal time series were used to predict the moment-to-moment ISCs computed using a 17-s moving average. During movie viewing, participants' brain activity was synchronized in lower- and higher-order sensory areas and in corticolimbic emotion circuits. Negative valence was associated with increased ISC in the emotion-processing network (thalamus, ventral striatum, insula) and in the default-mode network (precuneus, temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus). High arousal was associated with increased ISC in the somatosensory cortices and visual and dorsal attention networks comprising the visual cortex, bilateral intraparietal sulci, and frontal eye fields. Seed-voxel–based correlation analysis confirmed that these sets of regions constitute dissociable, functional networks. We propose that negative valence synchronizes individuals’ brain areas supporting emotional sensations and understanding of another’s actions, whereas high arousal directs individuals’ attention to similar features of the environment. By enhancing the synchrony of brain activity across individuals, emotions may promote social interaction and facilitate interpersonal understanding.
...in another empirical study, Hyon et al. show that beyond univariate response magnitude, socially close individuals show similar fine-grained response patterns to engaging, documentary-style video ...clips, especially in regions associated with high-level processing (Hyon et al., 2020). ...though horror movies have been used before to study fear responses, Hudson and colleagues used two full-length horror movies (selected according to Rotten Tomatoes ratings) in some unique ways, including modeling jump-scares and using dynamic, continuous fear-ratings to model sustained fear responses for both task-based and functional connectivity analyses (Hudson et al., 2020). Synchronization between instructor and observer when learning a complex bimanual skill A naturalistic viewing paradigm using 360° panoramic video clips and real-time field-of-view changes with eye-gaze tracking Towards OPM-MEG in a virtual reality environment The effect of movie-watching on electroencephalographic responses to tactile stimulation Dissociable neural systems for unconditioned acute and sustained fear Vision: Beyond basics. ...we highlight work by Jiahui et al., whose paper on functional hyperalignment demonstrates an emerging method in which an intersubject approach is used to identify an individual subject's idiosyncratic functional topography (Jiahui et al., 2020).
We investigated the neural underpinnings of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of a naturalistic musical stimulus. Participants were scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while ...listening to a stimulus with a rich musical structure, a modern tango. We correlated temporal evolutions of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of the stimulus, extracted using acoustic feature extraction procedures, with the fMRI time series. Results corroborate those obtained with controlled stimuli in previous studies and highlight additional areas recruited during musical feature processing. While timbral feature processing was associated with activations in cognitive areas of the cerebellum, and sensory and default mode network cerebrocortical areas, musical pulse and tonality processing recruited cortical and subcortical cognitive, motor and emotion-related circuits. In sum, by combining neuroimaging, acoustic feature extraction and behavioral methods, we revealed the large-scale cognitive, motor and limbic brain circuitry dedicated to acoustic feature processing during listening to a naturalistic stimulus. In addition to these novel findings, our study has practical relevance as it provides a powerful means to localize neural processing of individual acoustical features, be it those of music, speech, or soundscapes, in ecological settings.
► Novel paradigm combines fMRI, acoustic feature extraction and behavioral psychology. ► Timbre recruits cerebellar cognitive areas, sensory and DMN-related cortical areas. ► Rhythm and tonality recruit limbic regions, cognitive and somatomotor areas.
•Human fMRI studies increasingly disclose fingerprint activation patterns with MVPA.•New methods enable study of how such fingerprint patterns interact during cognition.•Two-photon calcium imaging ...suggests sparse code as neural organizational principle.•Sparse representations may give rise to the fingerprint patterns seen with fMRI.
Accumulating multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) results from fMRI studies suggest that information is represented in fingerprint patterns of activations and deactivations during perception, emotions, and cognition. We postulate that these fingerprint patterns might reflect neuronal-population level sparse code documented in two-photon calcium imaging studies in animal models, i.e., information represented in specific and reproducible ensembles of a few percent of active neurons amidst widespread inhibition in neural populations. We suggest that such representations constitute a fundamental organizational principle via interacting across multiple levels of brain hierarchy, thus giving rise to perception, emotions, and cognition.
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