A New Paradigm for Deciphering the Neural Mechanisms of Emotions

描述（由申请人提供）：情绪为生存和社会沟通提供基本功能。 多个大脑区域被认为是情绪大脑的一部分，但它们如何产生情绪目前尚不清楚。这个项目的总体目标是填补我们知识中的这一空白，并确定情感大脑多个区域之间的功能性相互作用如何产生情感的内部状态，它们的定义属性是什么，以及它们如何在行为中表达。该方法由三个部分组成。在具体目标1中，最复杂的情绪效应器，面部表情系统的活动模式将被一种新的记录设备监测，这些模式及其转换的统计特性将被量化。这个目标的目的是客观地定义和自动检测面部的情感表达。在具体目标2中，情绪大脑将被利用到感官线索和使用社会反射的可观察反应，其中看到的情绪面孔会被观察者短暂但反射性地模仿。全脑功能磁共振成像将定位介导这种行为的回路节点，随后的电生理记录将识别通过该回路节点的信息流和转换。在具体目标3中， 在文献中确定的情绪脑将被大规模并行电生理记录作为目标，以在广泛的行为状态期间从分布的神经回路获得时空精确的活动曲线。这些数据将被用来推断情感脑回路之间的功能相互作用，并确定它们是否形成离散或分级的活动状态，互斥的或混合的，包括局部或分布式活动。这些结果将允许情绪状态的客观表征和当前主要的情绪理论的评估。该项目的成果预计将对情感神经科学产生重大影响，通过直接解决其最基本的问题;运动神经科学，通过揭示面部表情系统的编码原则;社会神经科学，通过推导非语言交流的“词汇”;和系统神经科学，通过揭示全球分布式活动状态如何与本地信息处理相互作用。情绪和面部表情的紊乱是许多精神疾病的特征，包括双相情感障碍、精神分裂症或自闭症谱系障碍。因此，该项目符合国家精神卫生研究所的战略目标，即对基本的大脑行为过程进行综合理解，为理解精神障碍提供坚实的基础。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotions serve essential functions for survival and social communication. Multiple brain areas are recognized as part of the emotional brain, yet how they generate emotions it is currently unknown. The overall objective of this project is to fil this gap in our knowledge and determine how functional interactions between the multiple areas of the emotional brain generate internal states of emotion, what their defining properties are, and how they are expressed in behavior. The approach consists of three components. In Specific Aim 1, activity patterns of the most sophisticated effector of the emotions, the facial expression system, will be monitored with a new recording device, and the statistical properties of these patterns and their transitions will be quantified. The objective of this aim is to objectiely define and automatically detect emotional expressions of the face. In Specific Aim 2, the emotional brain will be harnessed to sensory cues and observable responses using social reflexes, in which seen emotional faces are briefly but reflexively mimicked by their observers. Whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging will localize the nodes of the circuit mediating this behavior, and subsequent electrophysiological recordings will identify information flow and transformation through the nodes of this circuit. In Specific Aim 3, the multiple nodes of the emotional brain identified in the literature will be targeted for massively parallel electrophysiological recording to obtain spatiotemporally precise activity profiles from distribute neural circuits during a wide range of behavioral states. These data will be used to infer functional interactions between emotional brain circuits and to determine whether they form discrete or graded activity states, mutually exclusive ones or mixtures, comprising localized or distributed activity. These results will allow for an objective characterization of emotional state and an evaluation of major current theories of the emotions. The outcomes of this project are expected to have major impact on the affective neurosciences, by directly addressing its most fundamental question; motor neuroscience, by revealing the coding principles of the facial expression system; social neuroscience, by deriving the 'vocabulary' of non-verbal communication; and systems neuroscience, by revealing how global distributed activity states interact with local information processing. Disturbances of the emotion and its facial expression are characteristic of many psychiatric disorders including bipolar mood disorders, schizophrenia, or autism spectrum disorders. The project thus meets the strategic objective of the National Institute of Mental Health in pursuing an integrative understanding of a basic brain-behavior process to provide a firm foundation for understanding mental disorders.