Abstract
SummaryCentral to our subjective lives is the experience of different emotions. Recent behavioral work mapping emotional responses to 2,185 videos found that people experience upward of 27 distinct emotions occupying a high-dimensional space, and that emotion categories, more so than affective dimensions (e.g., valence), organize self-reports of subjective experience. Here, we sought to identify the neural substrates of this high-dimensional space of emotional experience using fMRI responses to all 2,185 videos. Our analyses demonstrated that (1) dozens of video-evoked emotions were accurately predicted from fMRI patterns in multiple brain regions with different regional configurations for individual emotions; (2) emotion categories better predicted cortical and subcortical responses than affective dimensions, outperforming visual and semantic covariates in transmodal regions; and (3) emotion-related fMRI responses had a cluster-like organization efficiently characterized by distinct categories. These results support an emerging theory of the high-dimensional emotion space, illuminating its neural foundations distributed across transmodal regions.
Highlights
Emotions are mental states generated by the brain, constituting an evaluative aspect of our diverse subjective experiences
Recent behavioral work mapping emotional responses to 2,185 videos found that people experience upward of 27 distinct emotions occupying a high-dimensional space, and that emotion categories, more so than affective dimensions, organize self-reports of subjective experience
We sought to identify the neural substrates of this high-dimensional space of emotional experience using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to all 2,185 videos
Summary
Emotions are mental states generated by the brain, constituting an evaluative aspect of our diverse subjective experiences. Subjective emotional experiences have been described in theoretical and empirical studies using a limited set of emotion categories (e.g., happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise) as proposed in early versions of basic emotion theory (Ekman and Friesen, 1969; Plutchik, 1980) and by broad affective dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal) that underpin the circumplex model of affect and the more recent core affect theory (Posner et al, 2005; Russell, 1980, 2003) Grounded in these theoretical claims, affective neuroscientists have investigated neural signatures underlying those representative emotion categories and affective dimensions (Barrett, 2017; Celeghin et al, 2017; Giordano et al, 2018; Hamann, 2012; Kragel and LaBar, 2015; Lindquist and Barrett, 2012; Saarimaki et al, 2016; Satpute and Lindquist, 2019; Wager et al, 2015), finding that distributed brain regions and functional networks are crucial for representing individual emotions. Much of the variability in the brain’s representation of emotional experience likely has yet to be explained (Cowen et al, 2019a; Lindquist and Barrett, 2012)
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