Intracranial EEG and Direct Cortical Stimulation Study of Stimulus-Driven and Cognitively-Modulated Emotional Processing in the Human Brain

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There has been a great deal of progress in the field of emotion research. However, most of the work has been performed with methods that have not enabled one to address what happens in the brain in the millisecond and millimeter space at the single-subject individual level. As a result, several key questions in the field of cognitive neuroscience have remained open for exploration. One of these key unknowns that we are addressing in our current proposal is the question of how brain regions specialized in processing emotional information interact with those areas of our brain that are engaged in perceiving the outer world. How does our perception get colored by our emotion? Our findings will enrich our understanding of the brain mechanisms of emotion generation while also constraining the plausibility of certain emotion theories. Our research will not only promote the progress of emotion and cognitive neuroscience, but also it will advance our understanding of how the mechanisms of healthy interaction between emotional and perceptual system might be affected in neuropsychiatric disorders and as such the proposed research will have potential benefits to our national health, prosperity and welfare. Lastly, through educational outreach programs, we will also support education and diversity to benefit our society. This research is focused on the interface between emotion and visual perception in the human brain. Our proposed research aims to explore how stimulus-driven and cognitively-modulated emotional processes affect our visual perception of faces. To reach the overarching goal of the proposed plan, we will adopt a multimodal approach to measure neuronal population activity with intracranial electrodes and probe their causal importance by perturbing their activity using direct cortical stimulation. In addition to intracranial electrophysiology (iEEG) and direct cortical stimulation (DCS), we will measure subjective report, behavior, and pupillary activity. Our research involves human subjects undergoing invasive monitoring for several days as part of clinical evaluation for refractory focal epilepsy. Stimulus-driven emotions are generated by biologically entrenched perceptions that may not be necessarily accessible to conscious awareness; as such, stimulus-driven emotions are associated with prototypical responses that quickly prepare for action. Emotional faces, such as those expressing anger and joy/happiness, are used to elicit stimulus-driven emotions. In contrast, cognitively-modulated emotions are generated through cognitive processes such as contextual information that lead to cognitive appraisal of how a stimulus relates to one's motivations, rather than a specific perceptual stimulus per se.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.