Common Functional Brain States Encode both Perceived Emotion and the Psychophysiological Response to Affective Stimuli

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 15444 - 10
• Main Authors: Bush, Keith A., Privratsky, Anthony, Gardner, Jonathan, Zielinski, Melissa J., Kilts, Clinton D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 18.10.2018; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 59/36; 631/378/1457; 631/378/2649; Adult; Affect; Anatomy; Arousal; Arousal - physiology; Brain; Brain - anatomy & histology; Brain - physiology; Brain architecture; Brain mapping; Brain Mapping - methods; Conductance; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Female; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Galvanic Skin Response - physiology; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Medical research; multidisciplinary; Neuroimaging; Perceptions; Psychophysiology; Recognition, Psychology - physiology; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Skin conductance response; Visual stimuli; Brain States; Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA); International Affective Picture System (IAPS); Affective Stimuli; Skin Conductance Response (SCR)
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-33621-6

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has critically advanced the neuroanatomical understanding of affect processing in the human brain. Central to these advancements is the brain state, a temporally-succinct fMRI-derived pattern of neural activation, which serves as a processing unit. Establishing the brain state’s central role in affect processing, however, requires that it predicts multiple independent measures of affect. We employed MVPA-based regression to predict the valence and arousal properties of visual stimuli sampled from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) along with the corollary skin conductance response (SCR) for demographically diverse healthy human participants (n = 19). We found that brain states significantly predicted the normative valence and arousal scores of the stimuli as well as the attendant individual SCRs. In contrast, SCRs significantly predicted arousal only. The prediction effect size of the brain state was more than three times greater than that of SCR. Moreover, neuroanatomical analysis of the regression parameters found remarkable agreement with regions long-established by fMRI univariate analyses in the emotion processing literature. Finally, geometric analysis of these parameters also found that the neuroanatomical encodings of valence and arousal are orthogonal as originally posited by the circumplex model of dimensional emotion.