Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2011 Sep;6(4):404-16. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq050. Epub 2010 Jun 8.
We investigated how visual and linguistic information interact in the perception of emotion. We borrowed a phenomenon from film theory which states that presentation of an as such neutral visual scene intensifies the percept of fear or suspense induced by a different channel of information, such as language. Our main aim was to investigate how neutral visual scenes can enhance responses to fearful language content in parts of the brain involved in the perception of emotion. Healthy participants' brain activity was measured (using functional magnetic resonance imaging) while they read fearful and less fearful sentences presented with or without a neutral visual scene. The main idea is that the visual scenes intensify the fearful content of the language by subtly implying and concretizing what is described in the sentence. Activation levels in the right anterior temporal pole were selectively increased when a neutral visual scene was paired with a fearful sentence, compared to reading the sentence alone, as well as to reading of non-fearful sentences presented with the same neutral scene. We conclude that the right anterior temporal pole serves a binding function of emotional information across domains such as visual and linguistic information.
我们研究了视觉和语言信息在情感感知中的相互作用。我们借鉴了电影理论中的一个现象，即呈现一个本身中性的视觉场景会增强不同信息渠道（如语言）引起的恐惧或悬念感知。我们的主要目的是研究中性视觉场景如何增强大脑中与情感感知相关部分对恐惧语言内容的反应。在参与者阅读带有或不带有中性视觉场景的恐惧和不那么恐惧的句子时，使用功能磁共振成像来测量他们的大脑活动。主要思想是，视觉场景通过微妙地暗示和具体说明句子中描述的内容，来增强语言中的恐惧内容。与单独阅读句子相比，当与恐惧的句子搭配时，右前颞极的激活水平会选择性地增加，而与阅读呈现相同中性场景的非恐惧句子相比也是如此。我们的结论是，右前颞极在视觉和语言等不同领域的情感信息绑定中起作用。
