Dissertation at the AFN Master in Maastricht regarding the ways emotion are perceived

1. +
[M.V. Peelen,A.P. Atkinson and P. Vuilleumier The Journal of Neuroscience, July 28, 2010 • 30(30):10127–10134 ]
SUPRAMODAL
REPRESENTATIONS OF
PERCEIVED EMOTIONS IN THE
HUMAN BRAIN
MONDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2012 MSCs: Angelo Bruschi, MD

2. + INTRODUCTION (I)
 Successful social interaction requires a precise understanding
of the feelings, thoughts, intentions and desires of other
people.
 Humans have the exceptional ability to infer
complex mental states from subtle sensory
cues. (e.g. Face, Body, Voice). (de Gelder et al., 2006 )
 These signals lead to the recognition of
an emotional state and activate similar
emotion-specific responses in the
observer. (Magnée et al., 2007)

3. + MAIN QUESTION (II)
 ARE THERE ANY BRAIN REGIONS
THAT ENCODE EMOTIONS
INDIPENDENTLY OF THE MODALITY
THROUGH WICH THEY ARE
PERCEIVED?

4. + STUDY DESIGN (III)
VOICE
STIMULI
HEALTY fMRI
BODY VOLUNTEERS RESPONSES
EMOTIONS
FACIAL
EMOTIONS

5. + PARTICIPANTS(IV)
 18 Adult Healthy Volunteers (10 women,
mean age 26, range 20-32) HAPPINESS
ANGER
 All right handed, normal vision, no history SADNESS
of psychiatric or neurological disease FEAR
DISGUST
 5 different emotions chosen

6. + EMOTIONAL STIMULI: FACES (V)
 Movies of emotional faces expression
taken from Banse and Scherer (1996).
Non facial body parts were cropped.
 5 different emotions chosen (Anger,
Disgust, Happiness, Fear, Sadness).
 Four actors (2 male + 2 female)
expressed each emotion.

7. + EMOTIONAL STIMULI: BODY (VI)
 Movies of emotional body expression taken
from Atkinson (2004). Actors wore uniform
dark-grey, tight-fitting clothes and headwear
so that all body parts (including face) were
covered.
 5 different emotions chosen (Anger,
Disgust, Happiness, Fear, Sadness).
 Four actors (2 male + 2 female) expressed
each emotion.

8. + EMOTIONAL STIMULI: VOICE (VII)
 Emotional voice stimuli taken from Montreal
Affective Voice set, Belin(2008). Consisted
of short (~1s), non linguistic interjections
(“Ahh”) expressing different emotions.
 5 different emotions chosen (Anger,
Disgust, Happiness, Fear, Sadness)
 Four actors (2 male + 2 female) expressed
each emotion

9. + DESIGN AND PROCEDURE (VIII)
 Participants performed 6
fMRI runs, each of 36 trials
as shown in figure.
 3 blocks of 12 trials, differing
in type of stimuli, with 2
different clips for each of the
5 emotions.
 Trials presented in random
order, to prevent any
prediction bias.
 After each presentation,
participants rated each
stimulus on a 3 point scale.
(Enhancement of involved
brain regions)

10. + DATA ACQUISITION: fMRI (IX)
 fMRI data were analysed using Multivoxel Pattern Analysis
(MVPA): a technique sensitive to fine-grained neural
representations. (Haynes & Rees, 2005)
 Moreover, using a spherical searchlight approach they tested
for regions in the brain where local activity patterns contained
information about emotion categories (fear, anger, etc.)
independent of stimulus modality (body, voice, face). (Kriegeskorte et
al., 2006)

11. + RESULTS: BEHAVIOURAL (X)
 The average rating of the perceived
emotions is 2,24 (as show in figure)
 Differences between perceived
intensities of emotions depended on
modality (p< 0.001). (Anger > Voice
Disgust > Body)
THEY EXCLUDED THE POSSIBILITY THAT DIFFERENCES
IN PERCEIVED INTENSITY COULD PROVIDE AN
ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION FOR SUPRAMODAL
EMOTION-SPECIFIC fMRI RESPONSES. (NONE OF THE
CORRELATIONS POSITIVE)

12. + RESULTS: fMRI (XI)
TWO CLUSTERS SHOWED SUPRAMODAL EMOTION INFORMATION: rmPFC and left
STS
 Results of a whole-brain searchlight analysis showed clusters with significant emotion-specific activity
patterns across modality. Similarity of activity patterns was expressed as a correlation value, with higher
correlations indicating higher similarity. rmPFC (p<0.05) and left STS (p<0.00001)
 Similarity of activity patterns was expressed as a correlation value, with higher correlations indicating
higher similarity.

13. + RESULTS: fMRI (XII)
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Supp Figure 1. Graphs showing the correlation matrices between the 5 emotion
categories, averaged across the 3 cross‐modality comparisons (face‐body, face‐
 Graphs showing the correlation matrices between the 5 emotion categories, averaged
voice, body‐voice) in MPFC (left) and STS (right) searchlight clusters. These
across the 3 cross-modality comparisons. These matrices provide information about the
matrices provide information about the similarities between the emotion‐related
similarities patterns. In both regions, the average within‐emotion correlation was
fMRI activity between the emotion-related fMRI activity patterns.
significantly higher than the average between‐emotion correlation (see Figure 3,
main text). In MPFC, the within‐emotion correlations (diagonal elements) were
 The activity associate with the between‐emotion correlations for Fear, different stimulus types
higher than each of the 4 corresponding same emotion perceived from
Disgust, and Happiness. Anger was equally correlated with Anger (r=0.5), Disgust
(Diagonal Elements) more Sadness was relatively highly correlated with than between them:
(r=0.5), and Fear (r=0.5), whereas similar within emotion categories
Disgust and Anger. In STS, all within‐emotion correlations were higher than each of
the 4 corresponding between‐emotion correlations.
Note that different scales were used for MPFC (0.35‐0.55) and STS (0.55‐0.75) PERCEIVED EMOTIONS
THERE IS A SUPRAMODAL REPRESENTATION OF
graphs, reflecting the difference in the mean correlation of these regions (see also
Figure 3, main text).
Abbreviations: Ang=anger, Dis=disgust, Fea=fear, Hap=happiness, Sad=sadness.

14. + DISCUSSION: SUMMARY (XIII)
Multi Voxel Pattern of activity in two cortical brain regions (rmPFC and left STS)
carried information about emotion categories REGARDLESS of the specific
sensory cues (Body, Face and Voice stimuli).
 NO DIFFERENCES FOUNDED between the
perceived intensity of different emotion categories:
EMOTION SPECIFIC PATTERNS in rmPFC and
STS could be related to SYSTEMATIC
DIFFERENCES in the intensity of different emotions.
 NO CONSISTENT DIFFERENCES between emotion
categories in the average magnitude of activity of
these regions, indicating SIMILAR OVERALL
RECRUITMENT of rmPFC and STS in processing
different types of emotions

15. + DISCUSSION: HYPOTESIS 1 (XIV)
BRIEFLY , THESE AREAS PROCESS THE "CONTENT" OF A
STIMULUS, REGARDLESS OF ITS SENSORY CHARACTERISTICS.
FIRST HYPOTESIS: These regions contains individual neurons that selectively represent
emotion categories at an ABSTRACT LEVEL. It is not known if this specific tuning may be
limited to the basic emotion categories used here or it’s possible to extend to:
 THE BASIC EMOTION USED IN THIS STUDY
(Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987)
 OTHER EMOTIONS (eg. Guilt, Shame)
(Binder et al., 2009)
 NON EMOTIONAL MENTAL STATES
(Binder et al., 2009)
 CONCEPTUAL REPRESENTATION MORE
GENERALLY (Binder et al., 2009)

16. + DISCUSSION: HYPOTESIS 2 (XV)
BRIEFLY , THESE AREAS PROCESS THE "CONTENT" OF A
STIMULUS, REGARDLESS OF ITS SENSORY CHARACTERISTICS.
SECOND HYPOTESIS: It is possible that Neurons in rmPCF and/or left STS may code for:
 PARTICULAR EMOTION DIMENSIONS
(Russel, 1980)
 SPECIFIC EMOTION COMPONENTS
(Novelty, Pleasantness, Relevance)
(Scherer, 1984)
 ACTION TENDENCIES ASSOCIATED WITH
EMOTIONS (Frijda, 1987)

17. + CONCLUSIONS: FUTURE STUDIES
(XV)
QUESTIONS FOR FUTURE STUDIES:
 RMPFC AND STS REPRESENT OTHER (EMOTIONAL AND NON
EMOTIONAL) MENTAL STATES THAN THOSE TESTED?
 WHAT EXTENT IS EMOTION SPECIFICITY IN THESE AREAS RELATED TO
THE EXPLICIT EVALUATION OF THE EMOTIONS? DOES EMOTION
SPECIFICITY PERSIST WHEN STIMULI IS PRESENTED OUTSIDE THE
FOCUS OF ATTENTION?
 ARE RMPFC AND STS SIMILARLY ACTIVATED BY PERCEIVED AND
EXPERIENCED EMOTIONS?
 IS THERE AN OVERLAP IN THE REPRESENTATION OF PERCEIVED
EMOTIONS AND SELF EXPERIENCED?

18. +
THANKS FOR THE
ATTENTION