Opioid system and human emotions Nummenmaa, Lauri; Tuominen, Lauri
British journal of pharmacology,
July 2018, Letnik:
175, Številka:
14
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Emotions are states of vigilant readiness that guide human and animal behaviour during survival‐salient situations. Categorical models of emotions posit neurally and physiologically distinct basic ...human emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness and surprise) that govern different survival functions. Opioid receptors are expressed abundantly in the mammalian emotion circuit, and the opioid system modulates a variety of functions related to arousal and motivation. Yet, its specific contribution to different basic emotions has remained poorly understood. Here, we review how the endogenous opioid system and particularly the μ receptor contribute to emotional processing in humans. Activation of the endogenous opioid system is consistently associated with both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. In general, exogenous opioid agonists facilitate approach‐oriented emotions (anger, pleasure) and inhibit avoidance‐oriented emotions (fear, sadness). Opioids also modulate social bonding and affiliative behaviour, and prolonged opioid abuse may render both social bonding and emotion recognition circuits dysfunctional. However, there is no clear evidence that the opioid system is able to affect the emotions associated with surprise and disgust. Taken together, the opioid systems contribute to a wide array of positive and negative emotions through their general ability to modulate the approach versus avoidance motivation associated with specific emotions. Because of the protective effects of opioid system‐mediated prosociality and positive mood, the opioid system may constitute an important factor contributing to psychological and psychosomatic resilience.
Linked Articles
This article is part of a themed section on Emerging Areas of Opioid Pharmacology. To view the other articles in this section visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.v175.14/issuetoc
Facial expressions of emotion involve a physical component of morphological changes in a face and an affective component conveying information about the expresser's internal feelings. It remains ...unresolved how much recognition and discrimination of expressions rely on the perception of morphological patterns or the processing of affective content. This review of research on the role of visual and emotional factors in expression recognition reached three major conclusions. First, behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational measures indicate that basic expressions are reliably recognized and discriminated from one another, albeit the effect may be inflated by the use of prototypical expression stimuli and forced-choice responses. Second, affective content along the dimensions of valence and arousal is extracted early from facial expressions, although this coarse affective representation contributes minimally to categorical recognition of specific expressions. Third, the physical configuration and visual saliency of facial features contribute significantly to expression recognition, with "emotionless" computational models being able to reproduce some of the basic phenomena demonstrated in human observers. We conclude that facial expression recognition, as it has been investigated in conventional laboratory tasks, depends to a greater extent on perceptual than affective information and mechanisms.
Bodily maps of emotions Nummenmaa, Lauri; Glerean, Enrico; Hari, Riitta ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2014, Letnik:
111, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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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
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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.
•The Reward process and the Emotion process are intertwined.•Evaluative appraisal processes determine the reward value of an event.•Different rewarding stimuli lead to shared and distinct neural ...activation patterns.•Self-reported pleasure can be used as common currency for pleasures.
Pleasure and reward are central for motivation, learning, feeling and allostasis. Although reward is without any doubt an affective phenomenon, there is no consensus concerning its relationship with emotion. In this mini-review we discuss this conceptual issue both from the perspective of theories of reward and emotion as well as human systems neuroimaging. We first describe how the reward process can be understood and dissected as intertwined with the emotion process, in particular in light of the appraisal theories, and then discuss how different facets of the reward process can be studied using neuroimaging and neurostimulation techniques. We conclude that future work needs to focus on mapping the similarities and differences across stimuli and mechanisms that are involved in reward processing and in emotional processing, and propose that an integrative affective sciences approach would provide means for studying the emotional nature of reward.
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.
Detection of Emotional Faces Calvo, Manuel G; Nummenmaa, Lauri
Journal of experimental psychology. General,
08/2008, Letnik:
137, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this study, the authors investigated
how salient visual features capture attention and facilitate
detection of emotional facial expressions. In a visual
search task, a target emotional face ...(happy, disgusted,
fearful, angry, sad, or surprised) was presented in an array
of neutral faces. Faster detection of happy and, to a lesser
extent, surprised and disgusted faces was found both under
upright and inverted display conditions. Inversion slowed
down the detection of these faces less than that of others
(fearful, angry, and sad). Accordingly, the detection
advantage involves processing of featural rather than
configural information. The facial features responsible for
the detection advantage are located in the mouth rather than
the eye region. Computationally modeled visual saliency
predicted both attentional orienting and detection. Saliency
was greatest for the faces (happy) and regions (mouth) that
were fixated earlier and detected faster, and there was
close correspondence between the onset of the modeled
saliency peak and the time at which observers initially
fixated the faces. The authors conclude that visual saliency
of specific facial features-especially the smiling
mouth-is responsible for facilitated initial
orienting, which thus shortens detection.
Happy facial expressions are recognized faster and more accurately than other expressions in categorization tasks, whereas detection in visual search tasks is widely believed to be faster for angry ...than happy faces. We used meta-analytic techniques for resolving this categorization versus detection advantage discrepancy for positive versus negative facial expressions. Effect sizes were computed on the basis of the r statistic for a total of 34 recognition studies with 3,561 participants and 37 visual search studies with 2,455 participants, yielding a total of 41 effect sizes for recognition accuracy, 25 for recognition speed, and 125 for visual search speed. Random effects meta-analysis was conducted to estimate effect sizes at population level. For recognition tasks, an advantage in recognition accuracy and speed for happy expressions was found for all stimulus types. In contrast, for visual search tasks, moderator analysis revealed that a happy face detection advantage was restricted to photographic faces, whereas a clear angry face advantage was found for schematic and "smiley" faces. Robust detection advantage for nonhappy faces was observed even when stimulus emotionality was distorted by inversion or rearrangement of the facial features, suggesting that visual features primarily drive the search. We conclude that the recognition advantage for happy faces is a genuine phenomenon related to processing of facial expression category and affective valence. In contrast, detection advantages toward either happy (photographic stimuli) or nonhappy (schematic) faces is contingent on visual stimulus features rather than facial expression, and may not involve categorical or affective processing.
Discrete Neural Signatures of Basic Emotions Saarimäki, Heini; Gotsopoulos, Athanasios; Jääskeläinen, Iiro P ...
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991),
06/2016, Letnik:
26, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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.
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.
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