Emotions are often felt in the body, and interoceptive feedback is an important component of conscious emotional experiences. Here, we provide support for cultural universality of bodily sensations associated with 13 emotions in a large international sample (3954 individuals from 101 countries, age range 18-90). Subjects were presented with two silhouettes of bodies alongside with emotional words and asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while they experienced each given emotion. We tested the effects of various background factors (age, sex, education, body-mass index, nationality, civilization, and language) on the bodily sensation maps. Bodily sensations associated with emotions were concordant across the tested cultures (rs > 0.82) and across the sexes (r > 0.80). Bodily sensations weakened during ageing (mean rs = 0.11 across emotions). We conclude that universality in experiencing emotions in the body is stronger than the differences due to culture or sex.

Human neuroimaging and behavioural studies suggest that somatomotor ‘mirroring’ of seen facial expressions may support their recognition. Here we show that viewing specific facial expressions triggers the representation corresponding to that expression in the observer’s brain. Twelve healthy female volunteers underwent two separate fMRI sessions: one where they observed and another where they displayed three types of facial expressions (joy, anger and disgust). Pattern classifier based on Bayesian logistic regression was trained to classify facial expressions (i) within modality (trained and tested with data recorded while observing or displaying expressions) and (ii) between modalities (trained with data recorded while displaying expressions and tested with data recorded while observing the expressions). Cross-modal classification was performed in two ways: with and without functional realignment of the data across observing/displaying conditions. All expressions could be accurately classified within and also across modalities. Brain regions contributing most to cross-modal classification accuracy included primary motor and somatosensory cortices. Functional realignment led to only minor increases in cross-modal classification accuracy for most of the examined ROIs. Substantial improvement was observed in the occipito-ventral components of the core system for facial expression recognition. Altogether these results support the embodied emotion recognition model and show that expression-specific somatomotor neural signatures could support facial expression recognition.

Human neuroimaging and behavioural studies suggest that somatomotor “mirroring” of seen facial expressions may support their recognition. Here we show that viewing specific facial expressions triggers the representation corresponding to that expression in the observer’s brain. Twelve healthy female volunteers underwent two separate fMRI sessions: one where they observed and another where they displayed three types of basic facial expressions (joy, anger and disgust). Pattern classifier based on Bayesian logistic regression was trained to classify facial expressions i) within modality (trained and tested with data recorded while observing or displaying expressions) and ii) between modalities (trained with data recorded while displaying expressions and tested with data recorded while observing the expressions). Cross-modal classification was performed in two ways: with and without functional realignment of the data across observing / displaying conditions. All expressions could be accurately classified within and also across modalities. Brain regions contributing most to cross-modal classification accuracy included primary motor and somatosensory cortices. Functional realignment led to only minor increases in cross-modal classification accuracy for most of the examined ROIs. Substantial improvement was observed in the occipito-ventral components of the core system for facial expression recognition. Altogether these results support the embodied emotion recognition model and show that expression-specific somatomotor neural signatures could support facial expression recognition.

Emotions modulate behavioral priorities based on exteroceptive and interoceptive inputs, and the related central and peripheral changes may often be experienced subjectively. Yet, it remains unresolved whether the perceptual and subjectively felt components of the emotion processes rely on shared brain mechanisms. We applied functional magnetic resonance imaging, a rich set of emotional movies, and high-dimensional, continuous ratings of perceived and felt emotions depicted in the same movies to investigate their cerebral organization. Eight main dimensions of emotions evoked during natural movie scene perception were represented in the brain across numerous spatial scales and patterns. Perceived and felt emotions generalized both between individuals and between different samples of stimuli depicting the same emotions. The neural affective space demonstrated an anatomical gradient from responses independent of specific emotions in polysensory areas and default mode regions to more localized and emotion-specific discrete processing in subcortical regions. Differences in neural activations during felt and perceived emotions suggest that temporoparietal areas and precuneus have a key role in computing the affective value of the sensory input. This affective value is then transformed into the subjective emotional experience in the anterior prefrontal cortices, cerebellum, and thalamus. Altogether these data reveal the similarities and differences of domain-general and emotion-specific affect networks in the brain during a wide range of perceived and felt emotions.

Анатомічний корпус Львівського медичного університету ім. Данила Галицького спроектував архітектор Йозеф Браунзайс. З нагоди 180-ліття з дня народження архітектора, що святкується цьогоріч, Львівський національний медичний університет імені Данила Галицького вшановує його пам'ять, бо він створив низку навчальних споруд, які стали Alma Mater для кількох поколінь студентів і лікарів. Згадки про творчість архітектора Йозефа Браунзайса, зокрема впливу його діяльності на архітектурний образ Львова, є у працях Тимофієнко В.І. [Тимофієнко В.І., 1999] та Вуйцика В.С.