Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, PO Box 35, Jyvaskyla FI-40014, Finland.
Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Helsinki, PO Box 57, Helsinki FI-00014, Finland.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2024 Nov 25;19(1). doi: 10.1093/scan/nsae082.
Despite the growing interest in the nonhuman animal emotionality, we currently know little about the human brain processing of nonconspecific emotional expressions. Here, we characterized the millisecond-scale temporal dynamics of human brain responses to conspecific human and nonconspecific canine emotional facial expressions. Our results revealed generally similar cortical responses to human and dog facial expressions in the occipital cortex during the first 500 ms, temporal cortex at 100-500 ms and parietal cortex at 150-350 ms from the stimulus onset. Responses to dog faces were pronounced at the latencies in temporal cortices corresponding to the time windows of early posterior negativity and late posterior positivity, suggesting attentional engagement to emotionally salient stimuli. We also utilized support vector machine-based classifiers to discriminate between the brain responses to different images. The subject trait-level empathy correlated with the accuracy of classifying the brain responses of aggressive from happy dog faces and happy from neutral human faces. This result likely reflects the attentional enhancement provoked by the subjective ecological salience of the stimuli.
尽管人们对非人类动物的情感越来越感兴趣，但我们目前对人类大脑处理非同类动物情感表达的了解甚少。在这里，我们描述了人类大脑对同类人类和非同类犬类情感面部表情的毫秒级时间动态响应。我们的研究结果表明，在刺激开始后的前 500 毫秒，在枕叶皮层中对人类和狗的面部表情有相似的皮层反应，在颞叶皮层中在 100-500 毫秒和顶叶皮层中在 150-350 毫秒。对狗脸的反应在时间皮层中表现明显，与早期后负性和晚期后正性的时间窗口相对应，表明对情绪显著刺激的注意力参与。我们还利用基于支持向量机的分类器来区分不同图像的大脑反应。主体特质水平的同理心与从愤怒的狗脸和从高兴的人脸中分类大脑反应的准确性相关。这一结果可能反映了刺激的主观生态显著性引起的注意力增强。
