Neurobiology of Human Cognitive-Emotion Interactions

情绪表达是社会交流的重要工具；它们提供有关环境中重要事件的具体信息，并提供有关发射者情绪状态的有价值的信息。因此，快速而准确地解码表情所承载的情感信息的能力是日常生活中的一个基本方面，甚至可以成为生存的关键。情感交流是多模式的，通常依靠视觉和听觉渠道(以及触觉，视情况而定)。重要的是，通过听觉通道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泛区域的大量个人。 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，比类似的刺激更容易记住，但没有情感价值(即中性)。尽管如此，关于这种情绪促进记忆的性质和特异性，特别是对听觉信息，仍然有几个悬而未决的问题。因此，本研究计划的总体目标是采用精心控制的实验范式、使用生态有效的刺激并使用最先进的神经成像技术测量大脑反应，即功能磁共振成像(FMRI)、功能近红外光谱(FNIRS)和脑电(EEG)。具体地说，我们将研究不同类型的情绪传递信息的大脑机制，这些机制涉及跨模式(视觉和听觉)、类别(面部表情和肢体表情；言语和非语言发声)以及不同程度的生物相关性(例如，语音和音乐)及其与记忆的相互作用。需要解决的主要问题包括： (1)与不同情绪和方式的记忆编码和提取相关的神经活动的时空模式是什么？ (2)情绪记忆有多具体？ (3)刺激相关性如何影响记忆的情绪调节？ 考虑到所用技术在时间和空间分辨率方面的互补性，我们的多管齐下的方法将使我们能够更好地描述与这些过程相关的大脑反应。此外，它将提供关于信号的确切性质及其与潜在神经元活动的关系的宝贵信息，这些信息是通过这些广泛使用的方法获得的。 综上所述，这些研究将有助于更好地理解大脑如何处理情绪信息，以及它如何与不同类别和感觉模式的认知过程相互作用。这些知识反过来将有助于发展情绪的超情态理论。

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.