Abstract
The behavioral differentiation of positive emotions has recently been studied in terms of their discrete adaptive functions or appraising profiles. Some preliminary neurophysiological evidences have been found with electroencephalography or autonomic nervous system measurements such as heart rate, skin conductance, etc. However, the brain’s hemodynamic responses to different positive emotions remain largely unknown. In the present study, the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique was employed. With this tool, we for the first time reported recognizable discrete positive emotions using fNIRS signals. Thirteen participants watched 30 emotional video clips to elicit 10 typical kinds of positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love), and their frontal neural activities were simultaneously recorded with a 24-channel fNIRS system. The multidimensional scaling analysis of participants’ subjective ratings on these 10 positive emotions revealed three distinct clusters, which could be interpreted as “playfulness” for amusement, joy, interest, “encouragement” for awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, pride, and “harmony” for love, serenity. Hemodynamic responses to these three positive emotion clusters showed distinct patterns, and HbO-based individual-level binary classifications between them achieved an averaged accuracy of 73.79 ± 11.49% (77.56 ± 7.39% for encouragement vs. harmony, 73.29 ± 11.87% for playfulness vs. harmony, 70.51 ± 13.96% for encouragement vs. harmony). Benefited from fNIRS’s high portability, low running cost and the relative robustness against motion and electrical artifacts, our findings provided support for implementing a more fine-grained emotion recognition system with subdivided positive emotion categories.
Highlights
Feeling proud of good grades, getting amused by funny jokes, or being peaceful when staying with families. . .There is more than one kind of “happiness” in our daily life but the diversity of those positive emotions was much understated in previous studies
We empirically focused on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), because it involves less motion artifacts and signal attenuation due to hairs (Naseer and Hong, 2015), and previous emotion related functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) studies have reported positive findings in the PFC region, both for those researches focused on the general emotion valence (e.g., Tai and Chau, 2009; Moghimi et al, 2012; Trambaiolli et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2018) and specific positive emotions (e.g., Nishitani et al, 2011; Kreplin and Fairclough, 2013; Kida et al, 2014)
The current study investigated the brain hemodynamic responses to different positive emotions using fNIRS
Summary
Feeling proud of good grades, getting amused by funny jokes, or being peaceful when staying with families. . .There is more than one kind of “happiness” in our daily life but the diversity of those positive emotions was much understated in previous studies. Tong (2015) differentiated 13 positive emotions (amusement, awe, challenge, compassion, contentment, gratitude, hope, interest, joy, pride, relief, romantic love, and serenity) in 13 appraisal dimensions (pleasantness, relevance, problem, etc.), and the accuracies to classify positive emotions with appraisal profiles were reported to be above chance levels Another vein of research focuses on the adaptive function of positive emotions. Fredrickson (2013) qualitatively described both the appraisal themes and functional resources accrued of 10 representative positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, love), but empirical evidence is still limited Most of those studies built their theories either on participants’ subjective appraisals or researchers’ personal interpretations for the proposed emotions; it is worth noting that cognitive appraisals do not necessarily cover all the aspects of the subjective experience of emotions. We’ll briefly review the empirical evidence for the differentiation of positive emotions based on these components
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