Abstract
Emotions can be perceived through the face, body, and whole-person, while previous studies on the abstract representations of emotions only focused on the emotions of the face and body. It remains unclear whether emotions can be represented at an abstract level regardless of all three sensory cues in specific brain regions. In this study, we used the representational similarity analysis (RSA) to explore the hypothesis that the emotion category is independent of all three stimulus types and can be decoded based on the activity patterns elicited by different emotions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected when participants classified emotions (angry, fearful, and happy) expressed by videos of faces, bodies, and whole-persons. An abstract emotion model was defined to estimate the neural representational structure in the whole-brain RSA, which assumed that the neural patterns were significantly correlated in within-emotion conditions ignoring the stimulus types but uncorrelated in between-emotion conditions. A neural representational dissimilarity matrix (RDM) for each voxel was then compared to the abstract emotion model to examine whether specific clusters could identify the abstract representation of emotions that generalized across stimulus types. The significantly positive correlations between neural RDMs and models suggested that the abstract representation of emotions could be successfully captured by the representational space of specific clusters. The whole-brain RSA revealed an emotion-specific but stimulus category-independent neural representation in the left postcentral gyrus, left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) and right superior temporal sulcus (STS). Further cluster-based MVPA revealed that only the left postcentral gyrus could successfully distinguish three types of emotions for the two stimulus type pairs (face-body and body-whole person) and happy versus angry/fearful, which could be considered as positive versus negative for three stimulus type pairs, when the cross-modal classification analysis was performed. Our study suggested that abstract representations of three emotions (angry, fearful, and happy) could extend from the face and body stimuli to whole-person stimuli and the findings of this study provide support for abstract representations of emotions in the left postcentral gyrus.
Highlights
The ability to understand the feelings of other people is part of successful social interactions in our daily life
Our study suggested that abstract representations of three emotions could extend from the face and body stimuli to whole-person stimuli and the findings of this study provide support for abstract representations of emotions in the left postcentral gyrus
Previous studies suggested that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) contained representations of emotions that were invariant to perceptual modality (Peelen et al, 2010; Chikazoe et al, 2014) and generalized to emotions inferred in the absence of any overt display (Skerry and Saxe, 2014)
Summary
The ability to understand the feelings of other people is part of successful social interactions in our daily life. Emotions can be perceived from various sensory cues, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, body movements, emotional wholepersons and vocal intonations (Gelder et al, 2006; Heberlein and Atkinson, 2009). These different sensory cues could elicit very similar emotions suggesting that the brain hosts “supramodal” or abstract representations of emotions regardless of the sensory cues. The neural representations in the MPFC and left superior temporal sulcus (STS) have been suggested to be modality-independent but emotion-specific (Peelen et al, 2010). Emotions were demonstrated to be represented at an abstract level and the abstract representations could be activated by the memories of an emotional event (Kim et al, 2015)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
