Abstract
Sound is a potent elicitor of emotions. Auditory core, belt and parabelt regions have anatomical connections to a large array of limbic and paralimbic structures which are involved in the generation of affective activity. However, little is known about the functional role of auditory cortical regions in emotion processing. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and music stimuli that evoke joy or fear, our study reveals that anterior and posterior regions of auditory association cortex have emotion-characteristic functional connectivity with limbic/paralimbic (insula, cingulate cortex, and striatum), somatosensory, visual, motor-related, and attentional structures. We found that these regions have remarkably high emotion-characteristic eigenvector centrality, revealing that they have influential positions within emotion-processing brain networks with “small-world” properties. By contrast, primary auditory fields showed surprisingly strong emotion-characteristic functional connectivity with intra-auditory regions. Our findings demonstrate that the auditory cortex hosts regions that are influential within networks underlying the affective processing of auditory information. We anticipate our results to incite research specifying the role of the auditory cortex—and sensory systems in general—in emotion processing, beyond the traditional view that sensory cortices have merely perceptual functions.
Highlights
Affective neuroscience has been interested primarily in limbic/paralimbic structures as neural correlates of emotion
The coordinates of seed voxels were individually adjusted for the Psychophysiological Interaction analysis (PPI) analysis: For each participant, and for each structure identified in the group results, we identified the coordinate of the peak voxel of that participant within a sphere of 4 mm radius around the peak coordinate of the respective general linear model (GLM), or Eigenvector Centrality Mapping (ECM) cluster
The contrast joy > fear showed significant activation of the supratemporal cortex bilaterally, extending laterally onto the convexity of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), and medially into the temporal operculum, with the maxima of activations being located in the primary auditory cortex on Heschl’s gyrus (TE1.0 according to the SPM anatomy toolbox [56])
Summary
Affective neuroscience has been interested primarily in limbic/paralimbic structures as neural correlates of emotion. Evidence regarding the role of sensory cortices in the incitement, regulation and modulation of emotions is relatively sparse. With regard to auditory processing, neuroanatomical studies showed projections from primary auditory cortex (PAC) to the lateral amygdala in rats [1], and it has been well established that these projections are involved in fear conditioning to auditory stimuli, and probably involved in the modulation of fear responses. The role of the auditory cortex in emotional responses to sounds is still only poorly understood.
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