Abstract Representations of Associated Emotions in the Human Brain

Abstract

Emotions can be aroused by various kinds of stimulus modalities. Recent neuroimaging studies indicate that several brain regions represent emotions at an abstract level, i.e., independently from the sensory cues from which they are perceived (e.g., face, body, or voice stimuli). If emotions are indeed represented at such an abstract level, then these abstract representations should also be activated by the memory of an emotional event. We tested this hypothesis by asking human participants to learn associations between emotional stimuli (videos of faces or bodies) and non-emotional stimuli (fractals). After successful learning, fMRI signals were recorded during the presentations of emotional stimuli and emotion-associated fractals. We tested whether emotions could be decoded from fMRI signals evoked by the fractal stimuli using a classifier trained on the responses to the emotional stimuli (and vice versa). This was implemented as a whole-brain searchlight, multivoxel activation pattern analysis, which revealed successful emotion decoding in four brain regions: posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), precuneus, MPFC, and angular gyrus. The same analysis run only on responses to emotional stimuli revealed clusters in PCC, precuneus, and MPFC. Multidimensional scaling analysis of the activation patterns revealed clear clustering of responses by emotion across stimulus types. Our results suggest that PCC, precuneus, and MPFC contain representations of emotions that can be evoked by stimuli that carry emotional information themselves or by stimuli that evoke memories of emotional stimuli, while angular gyrus is more likely to take part in emotional memory retrieval.

Common neural correlates of emotion perception in humans

“…Our study links nicely with two previous studies investigating supramodel representations of emotions using whole‐brain searchlight analyses [Kim et al, ; Peelen et al, ]. Together, these studies highlighted five brain regions (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, precuneus, temporo‐parietal junction, and superior temporal sulcus (STS)) that contained information concerning several emotions, independent of presentation modality (face, body, sound, or abstract pattern).…”

Emotion Perception from Face, Voice, and Touch: Comparisons and Convergence

“…For example, emotional faces, voices, and body postures could all be classified from activation in STS and medial PFC [28]. Emotional faces and fractals for which participants had learned to associate an emotion could be classified from activation in medial PFC and posterior cingulate [77]. …”

Consumer Responses to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Contribution Type

“…Monetary versus In-kind Contributions Differences in consumers' reactions to monetary versus in-kind corporate contributions are likely to hinge on certain dimensions on which these contribution types vary. One such dimension is their level of emotionality, which we define as the extent to which each contribution type is associated with emotional concepts (Kim et al 2015;Nielsen, Shapiro, and Mason 2010;Ochser and Gross 2007). We suggest that in-kind contributions are likely to be characterized by greater emotionality than are monetary contributions.…”