Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA.
Neuroimage. 2020 Aug 1;216:116851. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116851. Epub 2020 Apr 12.
We spend much of our lives pursuing or avoiding affective experiences. However, surprisingly little is known about how these experiences are represented in the brain and if they are shared across individuals. Here, we explored variations in the construction of an affective experience during a naturalistic viewing paradigm based on subjective preferences in sociosexual desire and self-control using intersubject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA). We found that when watching erotic movies, intersubject variations in sociosexual desire preferences of 26 heterosexual males were associated with similarly structured fluctuations in the cortico-striatal reward, default mode, and mentalizing networks. In contrast, variations in the self-control preferences were associated with shared dynamics in the fronto-parietal executive control and cingulo-insular salience networks. Importantly, these results were specific to the affective experience, as we did not observe any relationship with variation in preferences when individuals watched neutral movies. Moreover, these results appear to require multivariate representations of preferences as we did not observe any significant associations using single scalar summary scores. Our findings indicate that multidimensional variations in individual preferences can be used to uncover unique dimensions of an affective experience, and that IS-RSA can provide new insights into the neural processes underlying psychological experiences elicited through naturalistic experimental designs.
我们一生中的大部分时间都在追求或避免情感体验。然而，令人惊讶的是，人们对这些体验在大脑中的表现方式以及它们是否在个体之间共享知之甚少。在这里，我们使用主体间代表性相似性分析（IS-RSA），基于社会性行为欲望和自我控制的主观偏好，探索了自然观看范式中情感体验构建的变化。我们发现，当观看色情电影时，26 名异性恋男性的社会性行为欲望偏好的个体间变化与皮质纹状体奖励、默认模式和心理化网络的相似结构波动有关。相比之下，自我控制偏好的变化与额顶叶执行控制和扣带岛前突显网络的共享动态有关。重要的是，这些结果是特定于情感体验的，因为当个体观看中性电影时，我们没有观察到任何与偏好变化的关系。此外，这些结果似乎需要对偏好进行多维表示，因为我们没有观察到使用单个标量汇总分数的任何显著关联。我们的研究结果表明，个体偏好的多维变化可以用来揭示情感体验的独特维度，并且 IS-RSA 可以为通过自然实验设计引发的心理体验的神经过程提供新的见解。
