Nguyen Vinh Thai, Breakspear Michael, Hu Xintao, Guo Christine Cong
QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Herston, QLD, Australia.
QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Herston, QLD, Australia; Black Dog Institute, Sydney, Australia.
Neuroimage. 2016 Jan 1;124(Pt A):455-463. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.08.078. Epub 2015 Sep 13.
Whilst external events trigger emotional responses, interoception (the perception of internal physiological states) is fundamental to core emotional experience. By combining high resolution functional neuroimaging with concurrent physiological recordings, we investigated the neural mechanisms of interoceptive integration during free listening to an emotionally salient audio film. We found that cardiac activity, a key interoceptive signal, was robustly synchronised across participants and centrally represented in the posterior insula. Effective connectivity analysis revealed that the anterior insula, specifically tuned to the emotionally salient moments of the audio stream, serves as an integration hub of interoceptive processing: interoceptive states represented in the posterior insula are integrated with exteroceptive representations by the anterior insula to highlight these emotionally salient moments. Our study for the first time demonstrates the insular hierarchy for interoceptive processing during natural emotional experience. These findings provide an ecologically-valid framework for elucidating the neural underpinnings of emotional deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders.
虽然外部事件会引发情绪反应，但内感受（对内部生理状态的感知）是核心情绪体验的基础。通过将高分辨率功能神经成像与同步生理记录相结合，我们研究了在自由聆听情感突出的有声电影期间内感受整合的神经机制。我们发现，心脏活动作为关键的内感受信号，在参与者之间得到了强烈同步，并在脑岛后部集中表征。有效连接性分析表明，专门针对音频流中情感突出时刻进行调整的前脑岛，是内感受处理的整合枢纽：脑岛后部所表征的内感受状态通过前脑岛与外感受表征整合，以突出这些情感突出时刻。我们的研究首次证明了自然情绪体验期间内感受处理的脑岛层级结构。这些发现为阐明神经精神疾病中情绪缺陷的神经基础提供了一个生态有效的框架。
