Neural representations of emotion are organized around abstract event features.
Neural representations of emotion are organized around abstract event features.
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2015.06.009
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发表时间：
2015-08-03
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Saxe R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Skerry AE;Saxe R
情绪归因的研究往往集中在对最多五六种基本情绪的外显表达的感知上。然而，我们识别他人情绪状态的能力并不局限于对这些规范表达的感知。相反，我们会根据他人所遇到的情况，对他们的感受做出细致的推断，这依赖于对不同情绪引发条件的了解。在本研究中，我们提供了收敛的行为和神经的证据，这些概念的表征。首先，我们发现，心智化区域的活动模式包含了通过对诱发情境的口头描述传达的微妙情感差异的信息。其次，我们确定了一个空间的抽象的情况下的功能，很好地捕捉情感歧视的主体行为，并表明，这个功能空间优于竞争模型在捕捉这些地区的神经模式的相似性空间。总之，这些数据表明，我们对他人情绪的了解是抽象的和高维度的，大脑区域选择性地进行精神状态推理，支持情绪概念之间相对微妙的区别，并且这些区域的神经表征不能简化为更原始的情感维度，如效价和唤醒。
Research on emotion attribution has tended to focus on the perception of overt expressions of at most five or six basic emotions. However, our ability to identify others' emotional states is not limited to perception of these canonical expressions. Instead, we make fine-grained inferences about what others feel based on the situations they encounter, relying on knowledge of the eliciting conditions for different emotions. In the present research, we provide convergent behavioral and neural evidence concerning the representations underlying these concepts. First, we find that patterns of activity in mentalizing regions contain information about subtle emotional distinctions conveyed through verbal descriptions of eliciting situations. Second, we identify a space of abstract situation features that well captures the emotion discriminations subjects make behaviorally and show that this feature space outperforms competing models in capturing the similarity space of neural patterns in these regions. Together, the data suggest that our knowledge of others' emotions is abstract and high dimensional, that brain regions selective for mental state reasoning support relatively subtle distinctions between emotion concepts, and that the neural representations in these regions are not reducible to more primitive affective dimensions such as valence and arousal.