Biology subjects

Volynets, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Volynets, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Psychopathic traits predict neural responses to emotional movies in the general population

Psychopathic personality traits such as callousness, manipulativeness, and lack of empathy are continuously distributed in non-institutionalized populations. Here, we show that brain responses to emotional movies in healthy females vary as a function of primary (PP) and secondary psychopathy (SP) traits. Healthy female volunteers (n=50) with variable scorings in Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale watched a set of emotional movie clips (n=39) during functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity. We found that participants low on primary and secondary psychopathy traits showed higher cortical and subcortical activity when watching emotional movies, what possibly indicates the somatosensory simulation and empathizing with the emotions of movie characters. On the other hand, the individuals with high primary and secondary psychopathy traits presented a lack of vicarious engagement during watching movies and they manifested brainstem-based heightened response towards thread-related stimuli, which could indicate potent autonomic reactivity. Overall, our results indicate that variability in psychopathic traits in the general population is manifested as differential neural responses to emotional signals, and confirm previous findings of there being separate PP and SP personality characteristics due to the dissociable brain activity patterns while viewing emotional movies.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Cerebral Topographies of Perceived and Felt Emotions

Emotions modulate behavioral priorities based on exteroceptive and interoceptive inputs, and the related central and peripheral changes may often be experienced subjectively. Yet, it remains unresolved whether the perceptual and subjectively felt components of the emotion processes rely on shared brain mechanisms. We applied functional magnetic resonance imaging, a rich set of emotional movies, and high-dimensional, continuous ratings of perceived and felt emotions depicted in the same movies to investigate their cerebral organization. Eight main dimensions of emotions evoked during natural movie scene perception were represented in the brain across numerous spatial scales and patterns. Perceived and felt emotions generalized both between individuals and between different samples of stimuli depicting the same emotions. The neural affective space demonstrated an anatomical gradient from responses independent of specific emotions in polysensory areas and default mode regions to more localized and emotion-specific discrete processing in subcortical regions. Differences in neural activations during felt and perceived emotions suggest that temporoparietal areas and precuneus have a key role in computing the affective value of the sensory input. This affective value is then transformed into the subjective emotional experience in the anterior prefrontal cortices, cerebellum, and thalamus. Altogether these data reveal the similarities and differences of domain-general and emotion-specific affect networks in the brain during a wide range of perceived and felt emotions.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Statistical Pattern Recognition Reveals Shared Neural Signatures for Displaying and Recognizing Specific Facial Expressions

Human neuroimaging and behavioural studies suggest that somatomotor "mirroring" of seen facial expressions may support their recognition. Here we show that viewing specific facial expressions triggers the representation corresponding to that expression in the observers brain. Twelve healthy female volunteers underwent two separate fMRI sessions: one where they observed and another where they displayed three types of basic facial expressions (joy, anger and disgust). Pattern classifier based on Bayesian logistic regression was trained to classify facial expressions i) within modality (trained and tested with data recorded while observing or displaying expressions) and ii) between modalities (trained with data recorded while displaying expressions and tested with data recorded while observing the expressions). Cross-modal classification was performed in two ways: with and without functional realignment of the data across observing / displaying conditions. All expressions could be accurately classified within and also across modalities. Brain regions contributing most to cross-modal classification accuracy included primary motor and somatosensory cortices. Functional realignment led to only minor increases in cross-modal classification accuracy for most of the examined ROIs. Substantial improvement was observed in the occipito-ventral components of the core system for facial expression recognition. Altogether these results support the embodied emotion recognition model and show that expression-specific somatomotor neural signatures could support facial expression recognition.

neuroscience↗