Lin Huiyan, Bruchmann Maximilian, Schindler Sebastian, Straube Thomas
Laboratory for Behavioural and Regional Finance, School of National Finance, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China.
Institute of Applied Psychology, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China.
Front Neurosci. 2024 Aug 5;18:1399948. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1399948. eCollection 2024.
Faces can acquire emotional meaning by learning to associate individuals with specific behaviors. Here, we investigated emotional evaluation and brain activations toward faces of persons who had given negative or positive evaluations to others. Furthermore, we investigated how emotional evaluations and brain activation generalize to perceptually similar faces. Valence ratings indicated learning and generalization effects for both positive and negative faces. Brain activation, measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), showed significantly increased activation in the fusiform gyrus (FG) to negatively associated faces but not positively associated ones. Remarkably, brain activation in FG to faces to which emotional meaning (negative and positive) was successfully generalized was decreased compared to neutral faces. This suggests that the emotional relevance of faces is not simply associated with increased brain activation in visual areas. While, at least for negative conditions, faces paired with negative feedback behavior are related to potentiated brain responses, the opposite is seen for perceptually very similar faces despite generalized emotional responses.
面孔可以通过学习将个体与特定行为联系起来而获得情感意义。在此，我们研究了对曾对他人给出负面或正面评价的人的面孔的情感评估和大脑激活情况。此外，我们还研究了情感评估和大脑激活如何推广到在感知上相似的面孔。效价评级表明对正面和负面面孔都有学习和推广效应。用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量的大脑激活显示，梭状回（FG）对负相关面孔的激活显著增加，而对正相关面孔则没有。值得注意的是，与中性面孔相比，FG对面孔的大脑激活在情感意义（负面和正面）成功推广时有所减少。这表明面孔的情感相关性并不简单地与视觉区域大脑激活的增加相关。虽然至少在负面情况下，与负面反馈行为配对的面孔与增强的大脑反应有关，但尽管有普遍的情感反应，在感知上非常相似的面孔却呈现相反的情况。
