Neurobiology of Human Cognitive-Emotion Interactions

情感表达是社会沟通的重要工具;它们告知同类有关其环境中的重要事件，并提供有关发射器情绪状态的有价值信息。因此，快速准确地解码表情所携带的情感信息的能力是日常生活的一个重要方面，甚至可能成为生存的关键。情感交流是多模式的，通常依赖于视觉和听觉渠道（以及触摸，取决于环境）。重要的是，通过听觉方式传达的情感信息可以更有效，因为它不需要直接的视觉接触，因此可以到达分散在广阔区域的大量个体。 有强有力的证据表明，情绪刺激，特别是那些发出可能危险信号的刺激，比类似的但没有情感价值的刺激（即，中性）。尽管如此，关于情绪对记忆的促进作用的性质和特异性，特别是对听觉信息的促进作用，仍然存在一些悬而未决的问题。因此，这项研究计划的总体目标是回答这些问题，采用精心控制的实验范式，使用生态有效的刺激和测量大脑反应与国家的最先进的神经成像技术，即功能性磁共振成像（fMRI），功能性近红外光谱（fNIRS）和脑电图（EEG）。具体来说，我们将研究涉及不同类型的情感传达信息的处理的大脑机制，这些信息跨越模态（视觉和听觉），类别（面部与身体表达;言语与非语言发声）以及不同程度的生物相关性（例如，声音与音乐）以及它们与记忆的相互作用。需要解决的主要问题是： (1)在不同的情绪和模态中，与记忆编码和提取相关的神经活动的时空模式是什么？ (2)情感记忆有多具体？ (3)刺激相关性如何影响记忆的情绪调节？ 我们多管齐下的方法将使我们能够更好地表征与这些过程相关的大脑反应，考虑到所使用的技术在时间和空间分辨率方面的互补性。此外，它将提供宝贵的信息，关于信号的确切性质，以及它们与这些广泛使用的方法获得的潜在神经元活动的关系。 总之，这些研究将有助于更好地理解大脑如何处理情感信息，以及它如何与不同类别和感觉方式的认知过程相互作用。反过来，这些知识将有助于发展情绪的超模态理论。

Emotional expressions are critical tools for social communication; they inform conspecifics about important events in their environment, as well as provide valuable information about the emotional state of the emitter. As such, the ability to rapidly and accurately decode the emotional information carried by an expression is an essential aspect of daily life and can even become crucial for survival. Emotional communication is multi-modal, typically relying on both visual and acoustic channels (as well as touch, depending on circumstances). Importantly, emotional information conveyed through the auditory modality can be more efficient, as it does not require direct visual contact and can thus reach a large number of individuals scattered across a wide area. There is strong evidence showing that emotional stimuli, especially those signalling possible danger, are better remembered than similar ones but with no affective value (i.e., neutral). Nonetheless, there are still several open questions regarding the nature and specificity of this memory facilitation by emotion, particularly for auditory information. Thus, the general aim of this research program is to answer these questions employing carefully-controlled experimental paradigms, using ecologically-valid stimuli and measuring brain responses with state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques, namely functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrarred spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG). Specifically, we will investigate the brain mechanisms involved in the processing of different types of emotion-conveying information across modalities (visual and auditory), classes (facial vs. body expressions; speech vs. nonlinguistic vocalizations) and with different degrees of biological relevance (e.g., voice vs. music) and their interaction with memory. The main questions to be addressed are: (1) What are the spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity associated with memory encoding and retrieval across different emotion and modalities? (2) How specific are emotional memories? (3) How does stimulus relevance affect the emotional modulation of memory? Our multipronged approach will allow us to gain a better characterization of brain responses associated with these processes, given the complementarity of the techniques used, in terms of temporal and spatial resolution. Moreover, it will provide invaluable information regarding the precise nature of the signals, and their relation to the underlying neuronal activity, obtained with these widely used methodologies. Taken together, these studies will contribute to a better understanding of how the brain processes emotional information and how it interacts with cognitive processes across different classes and sensory modalities. This knowledge, in turn, will help to develop a supra-modal theory of emotion.