Abstract
Emotional stimuli modulate activity in brain areas related to attention, perception, and movement. Similar increases in neural activity have been detected in the spinal cord, suggesting that this understudied component of the central nervous system is an important part of our emotional responses. To date, previous studies of emotion-dependent spinal cord activity have utilized long presentations of complex emotional scenes. The current study differs from this research by (1) examining whether emotional faces will lead to enhanced spinal cord activity and (2) testing whether these stimuli require conscious perception to influence neural responses. Fifteen healthy undergraduate participants completed six spinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) runs in which three one-minute blocks of fearful, angry, or neutral faces were interleaved with 40-s rest periods. In half of the runs, the faces were clearly visible while in the other half, the faces were displayed for only 17 ms. Spinal fMRI consisted of half-Fourier acquisition single-shot turbo spin-echo (HASTE) sequences targeting the cervical spinal cord. The results indicated that consciously perceived faces expressing anger elicited significantly more activity than fearful or neutral faces in ventral (motoric) regions of the cervical spinal cord. When stimuli were presented below the threshold of conscious awareness, neutral faces elicited significantly more activity than angry or fearful faces. Together, these data suggest that the emotional modulation of spinal cord activity is most impactful when the stimuli are consciously perceived and imply a potential threat toward the observer.
Highlights
Emotional responses are sensorimotor in nature and serve to enhance the likelihood that an individual will successfully detect and respond to a specific stimulus [1,2]
Numerous transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have shown that emotional stimuli and emotional states increase the excitability of the corticospinal tract, suggesting that emotion primes the motoric system in order to facilitate a response [10,11,12,13,14]
In order to increase clarity, the nine different analyses will be organized into three subsections consisting of (1) a comparison of conscious vs. unconscious perception of the same emotion, (2) a comparison of consciously perceived faces, and (3) a comparison of unconsciously perceived faces
Summary
Emotional responses are sensorimotor in nature and serve to enhance the likelihood that an individual will successfully detect and respond to a specific stimulus [1,2]. The importance of these responses can be seen at the neural level, with emotional stimuli receiving preferential processing in numerous regions of the central nervous system [3]. Fear- and threat-related stimuli reliably elicit enhanced levels of activity in extrastriate regions related to perception and attention [4,5]. Using fear- and disgust-eliciting images, Smith and Kornelsen [16]
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