Abstract
Emotions unfold over time with episodes differing in explosiveness (i.e., profiles having a steep vs. a gentle start) and accumulation (i.e., profiles increasing over time vs. going back to baseline). In the present fMRI study, we wanted to replicate and extend previous findings on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Specifically, we aimed to: (a) replicate the finding that different neural mechanisms are associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation, (b) replicate the finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective decreases emotion explosiveness and accumulation at the level of self-report, and (c) examine whether adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective similarly modulates activity in the brain regions associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Participants in an fMRI scanner were asked to adopt a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective while reading and thinking about negative social feedback, and to report on felt changes in negative affect during that period using an emotion intensity profile tracking approach. We replicated previous findings showing that emotion explosiveness and accumulation were related to activity in regions involved in self-referential processing (such as the medial prefrontal cortex) and sustained visceral arousal (such as the posterior insula), respectively. The finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective lowers emotion explosiveness and accumulation was also replicated at a self-report level. However, perspective taking did not impact activity in the neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation.
Highlights
Emotions are dynamic processes that unfold over time
In a first series of region of interest analyses we examined whether the current explosiveness and accumulation regressors were predictive of neural activity in the global regions of interest that comprised all clusters identified by Resibois, Verduyn and colleagues [11] to be associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation, respectively
In the two series of region of interest analyses and in the voxelwise whole brain analyses, emotion explosiveness appeared again to be associated with regions of self-referential processing, whereas emotion accumulation appeared again to be associated with regions of sustained monitoring of visceral arousal and the sensory component of social exclusion
Summary
Emotions are dynamic processes that unfold over time. As such, studying the temporal features of emotions is a prerequisite to reach a full understanding of how emotions function [1,2]. It has been shown that emotion intensity profiles collected with an intensity profile tracking approach can take a wide range of possible shapes reflecting the inherent complexity of emotion dynamics [1,2,7,8]. To describe this shape variability, Frijda and colleagues used a number of dynamic features, such as the number of peaks and valleys, the intensity of the highest peak, and the area underneath the curve. To better understand variability in profile shapes, one should examine which features optimally describe this variability, and identify the factors influencing these feature [1]
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