Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 9190401, Israel.
Department of Neurology, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, 9112001, Israel.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Apr 25;33(9):5727-5739. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhac455.
The conceptualization of emotional states as patterns of interactions between large-scale brain networks has recently gained support. Yet, few studies have directly examined the brain's network structure during emotional experiences. Here, we investigated the brain's functional network organization during experiences of sadness, amusement, and neutral states elicited by movies, in addition to a resting-state. We tested the effects of the experienced emotion on individual variability in the brain's functional connectome. Next, for each state, we defined a community structure of the brain and quantified its segregation and integration. We found that sadness, relative to amusement, was associated with higher modular integration and increased connectivity of cognitive control networks: the salience and fronto-parietal networks. Moreover, in both the functional connectome and the emotional report, the similarity between individuals was dependent on the sex. Our results suggest that the experience of emotion is linked to a reconfiguration of whole-brain distributed, not emotion-specific, functional networks and that the brain's topological structure carries information about the subjective emotional experience.
情绪状态的概念化被认为是大脑网络之间相互作用的模式，这一观点最近得到了支持。然而，很少有研究直接考察情绪体验过程中大脑的网络结构。在这里，我们通过电影诱发悲伤、愉悦和中性三种状态以及静息态，研究了大脑在情绪体验过程中的功能网络组织。我们检验了个体在大脑功能连接组中的变异性受经历情绪的影响。接下来，对于每种状态，我们定义了大脑的社区结构，并量化了其分离和整合。我们发现，与愉悦相比，悲伤与更高的模块整合以及认知控制网络（突显网络和额顶网络）的连接性增加有关。此外，在功能连接组和情绪报告中，个体之间的相似性取决于性别。我们的研究结果表明，情绪体验与全脑分布式的重新配置有关，而不是与特定情绪有关的功能网络，并且大脑的拓扑结构携带关于主观情绪体验的信息。
