Abstract
The insular cortex has been considered to be the neural base of visceral sensation for many years. Previous studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have accumulated evidence indicating that interoception is an essential factor in the subjective feeling of emotion. Recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that anterior insular cortex activation is associated with accessing interoceptive information and underpinning the subjective experience of emotional state. Only a small number of studies have focused on the influence of insular damage on emotion processing and interoceptive awareness. Moreover, disparate hypotheses have been proposed for the alteration of emotion processing by insular lesions. Some studies show that insular lesions yield an inability for understanding and representing disgust exclusively, but other studies suggest that such lesions modulate arousal and valence judgments for both positive and negative emotions. In this study, we examined the alteration in emotion recognition in three right insular and adjacent area damaged cases with well-preserved higher cognitive function. Participants performed an experimental task using morphed photos that ranged between neutral and emotional facial expressions (i.e., anger, sadness, disgust, and happiness). Recognition rates of particular emotions were calculated to measure emotional sensitivity. In addition, they performed heartbeat perception task for measuring interoceptive accuracy. The cases identified emotions that have high arousal level (e.g., anger) as less aroused emotions (e.g., sadness) and a case showed remarkably low interoceptive accuracy. The current results show that insular lesions lead to attenuated emotional sensitivity across emotions, rather than category-specific impairments such as to disgust. Despite the small number of cases, our findings suggest that the insular cortex modulates recognition of emotional saliency and mediates interoceptive and emotional awareness.
Highlights
Our emotional experience is well associated with internal bodily change
We examined the effects on emotional experience following brain lesions including the right anterior/middle insula cortex
Findings from the emotional sensitivity task and the heartbeat perception task indicated that the cases had blunted sensitivity to emotional expression and lower interoceptive accuracy
Summary
Our emotional experience is well associated with internal bodily change. We have a racing pulse or sweaty palms when we are excited. Some methods have been developed as measurements of an individual’s sensitivity to perceive interoception, such as the heartbeat perception task (Schandry, 1981) and water load test (Herbert et al, 2012) Some questionnaires such as the Autonomic Perception Questionnaire (Mandler et al, 1958), the Body Perception Questionnaire (Porges, 1993), and The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (Mehling et al, 2012) are known as indices of interoceptive sensibility (Garfinkel et al, 2015). A previous study of ours showed that interoceptive sensitivity predicts sensitivity to the emotions of others (Terasawa et al, 2014) These findings indicate that the way in which interoceptive information is processed can affect emotional experience in daily life
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