Assistant Professor of Education at the Rossier School of Education, Neuroscience Graduate Program Faculty, 3641 Watt Way, Suite B17, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Oct;8(7):806-12. doi: 10.1093/scan/nss075. Epub 2012 Jul 13.
Complex social emotions involve both abstract cognitions and bodily sensations, and individuals may differ on their relative reliance on these. We hypothesized that individuals' descriptions of their feelings during a semi-structured emotion induction interview would reveal two distinct psychological styles-a more abstract, cognitive style and a more body-based, affective style-and that these would be associated with somatosensory neural activity. We examined 28 participants' open-ended verbal responses to admiration- and compassion-provoking narratives in an interview and BOLD activity to the same narratives during subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Consistent with hypotheses, individuals' affective and cognitive word use were stable across emotion conditions, negatively correlated and unrelated to reported emotion strength in the scanner. Greater use of affective relative to cognitive words predicted more activation in SI, SII, middle anterior cingulate cortex and insula during emotion trials. The results suggest that individuals' verbal descriptions of their feelings reflect differential recruitment of neural regions supporting physical body awareness. Although somatosensation has long been recognized as an important component of emotion processing, these results offer 'proof of concept' that individual differences in open-ended speech reflect different processing styles at the neurobiological level. This study also demonstrates SI involvement during social emotional experience.
复杂的社会情感既涉及抽象认知，也涉及身体感觉，个体在这两者的相对依赖程度上可能存在差异。我们假设，个体在半结构化情感诱发访谈中描述自己的感受时，会表现出两种截然不同的心理风格——一种更抽象、更注重认知的风格，另一种更基于身体、更感性的风格——而这两种风格与体感神经活动有关。我们对 28 名参与者在访谈中对赞赏和同情叙事的开放式口头反应以及随后在功能磁共振成像扫描中对相同叙事的大脑活动进行了研究。与假设一致，个体的情感和认知词汇的使用在不同的情绪条件下是稳定的，与扫描仪中报告的情绪强度呈负相关且无关。与认知词汇相比，更多地使用情感词汇预测了在情绪试验中 SI、SII、中前扣带皮层和脑岛的更多激活。研究结果表明，个体对自己感受的口头描述反映了支持身体意识的神经区域的差异招募。尽管体感长期以来一直被认为是情绪处理的重要组成部分，但这些结果提供了“概念验证”，即开放式言语中的个体差异反映了神经生物学水平上不同的处理方式。本研究还证明了 SI 在社会情感体验中的参与。
