Department of Psychology, University of Muenster, Institute for Psychology, Fliednerstraße 21, Münster D-48149, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Muenster, Institute for Psychology, Fliednerstraße 21, Münster D-48149, Germany; Otto-Creutzfeldt-Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2022 Nov 1;261:119524. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119524. Epub 2022 Jul 27.
Emotional experiences are proposed to arise from contextualized perception of bodily responses, also referred to as interoceptive inferences. The recognition of emotions benefits from adequate access to one's own interoceptive information. However, direct empirical evidence of interoceptive inferences and their neural basis is still lacking. In the present fMRI study healthy volunteers performed a probabilistic emotion classification task with videotaped dynamically unfolding facial expressions. In a first step, we aimed to determine functional areas involved in the processing of dynamically unfolding emotional expressions. We then tested whether individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy (IAcc), as assessed by the Heartbeat detection task (HDT), or higher interoceptive sensitivity (IS), as assessed by the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2), benefit more from the contextually given likelihood of emotional valence and whether brain regions reflecting individual IAcc and/or IS play a role in this. Individuals with higher IS benefitted more from the biased probability of emotional valence. Brain responses to more predictable emotions elicited a bilateral activity pattern comprising the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior insula. Importantly, individual IAcc scores positively covaried with brain responses to more surprising and less predictable emotional expressions in the insula and caudate nucleus. We show for the first time that IAcc score is associated with enhanced processing of interoceptive prediction errors, particularly in the anterior insula. A higher IS score seems more likely to be associated with a stronger weighting of attention to interoceptive changes processed by the posterior insula and ventral prefrontal cortex.
情绪体验被认为源自对身体反应的情境化感知，也被称为内感受推断。情绪的识别得益于对自身内感受信息的充分获取。然而，内感受推断及其神经基础的直接实证证据仍然缺乏。在本 fMRI 研究中，健康志愿者通过动态展开的面部表情录像进行了概率性情绪分类任务。在第一步中，我们旨在确定参与动态展开情绪表达处理的功能区域。然后，我们测试了具有更高内感受准确性（IAcc）的个体，如通过心跳检测任务（HDT）评估，或者具有更高内感受敏感性（IS）的个体，如通过多维内感受意识评估 2 版（MAIA-2）评估，是否更受益于上下文给出的情绪效价的可能性，以及个体的 IAcc 和/或 IS 是否在这方面发挥作用。具有更高 IS 的个体从有偏差的情绪效价概率中获益更多。对更可预测的情绪的大脑反应引发了包括下额叶和后岛的双侧活动模式。重要的是，个体 IAcc 评分与岛叶和尾状核中更令人惊讶和不可预测的情绪表达的内感受预测误差的大脑反应呈正相关。我们首次表明，IAcc 评分与内感受预测误差的增强处理相关，特别是在前岛叶。更高的 IS 评分似乎更有可能与对后岛叶和腹侧前额叶皮层处理的内感受变化的注意力更强加权相关。
