Neocortical substrates of feelings evoked with music in the ACC, insula, and somatosensory cortex

Abstract

Neurobiological models of emotion focus traditionally on limbic/paralimbic regions as neural substrates of emotion generation, and insular cortex (in conjunction with isocortical anterior cingulate cortex, ACC) as the neural substrate of feelings. An emerging view, however, highlights the importance of isocortical regions beyond insula and ACC for the subjective feeling of emotions. We used music to evoke feelings of joy and fear, and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to decode representations of feeling states in functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) data of n = 24 participants. Most of the brain regions providing information about feeling representations were neocortical regions. These included, in addition to granular insula and cingulate cortex, primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, premotor cortex, frontal operculum, and auditory cortex. The multivoxel activity patterns corresponding to feeling representations emerged within a few seconds, gained in strength with increasing stimulus duration, and replicated results of a hypothesis-generating decoding analysis from an independent experiment. Our results indicate that several neocortical regions (including insula, cingulate, somatosensory and premotor cortices) are important for the generation and modulation of feeling states. We propose that secondary somatosensory cortex, which covers the parietal operculum and encroaches on the posterior insula, is of particular importance for the encoding of emotion percepts, i.e., preverbal representations of subjective feeling.

The promise of music therapy for Alzheimer's disease: A review

“…[46][47][48] In addition, both pre-SMA and caudal ACC also play a role in music-evoked emotions. 49,50 These findings suggest that musical memory and music-evoked emotions are also colocalized in the pre-SMA and caudal ACC, and these regions being last to degenerate in AD might explain why musical memory is surprisingly well preserved in AD patients.…”

“…Notably, both regions have also been shown to be among the last brain regions to degenerate in AD, showing little to no significant cortical atrophy or hypometabolism 46–48 . In addition, both pre‐SMA and caudal ACC also play a role in music‐evoked emotions 49,50 . These findings suggest that musical memory and music‐evoked emotions are also colocalized in the pre‐SMA and caudal ACC, and these regions being last to degenerate in AD might explain why musical memory is surprisingly well preserved in AD patients.…”

Does losing money truly hurt? The shared neural bases of monetary loss and pain

“…The AI is a multifunctional brain region that is involved in various cognitive, perceptual, and socio‐affective processes (Clos, Rottschy, Laird, Fox, & Eickhoff, 2014 ; Kurth, Zilles, Fox, Laird, & Eickhoff, 2010 ). In particular, activation of the insula plays an important role in affective processing (Koelsch, Cheung, Jentschke, & Haynes, 2021 ). Therefore, coactivation of the AI might reflect that monetary loss and pain engaged an overlapping neural module of affective processing.…”

Tinnitus Perception in Light of a Parietal Operculo–Insular Involvement: A Review

“…This region was further found to be more strongly connected to other cortices in musicians than in non-musicians [58] with an asymmetry between both hemispheres. Interestingly, in an fMRI study on feelings evoked by music, the authors contrasted the joy-and the fear-music decoding conditions and found a large activation pattern including the parietal operculum bilaterally and extending into the posterior insula [59]. Those authors further proposed that secondary somatosensory cortex, which covers the parietal operculum and encroaches on the posterior insula, was of particular importance for the encoding of emotion percepts.…”