Mistä puhumme kun puhumme tunteista?

Suomen kielen sana tunne on monimerkityksinen. Se viittaa paitsi fysiologiseen tunnereaktioon, myös tuntoaistin toimintaan sekä mielensisäisiin, tietoisiin kokemuksiin ja tuntemuksiin. Viimeksi kuluneen sadan vuoden aikana käsitys tunteiden toiminnasta on muuttunut radikaalisti

Reward and emotion: an affective neuroscience approach

Pleasure and reward are central for motivation, learning, feeling and allostasis. Although reward is without any doubt an affective phenomenon, there is no consensus concerning its relationship with emotion. In this mini-review we discuss this conceptual issue both from the perspective of theories of reward and emotion as well as human systems neuroimaging. We first describe how the reward process can be understood and dissected as intertwined with the emotion process, in particular in light of the appraisal theories, and then discuss how different facets of the reward process can be studied using neuroimaging and neurostimulation techniques. We conclude that future work needs to focus on mapping the similarities and differences across stimuli and mechanisms that are involved in reward processing and in emotional processing, and propose that an integrative affective sciences approach would provide means for studying the emotional nature of reward.</p

Data-driven approaches in the investigation of social perception

The complexity of social perception poses a challenge to traditional approaches to understand its psychological and neurobiological underpinnings. Data-driven methods are particularly well suited to tackling the often high-dimensional nature of stimulus spaces and of neural representations that characterize social perception. Such methods are more exploratory, capitalize on rich and large datasets, and attempt to discover patterns often without strict hypothesis testing. We present four case studies here: behavioural studies on face judgements, two neuroimaging studies of movies, and eyetracking studies in autism. We conclude with suggestions for particular topics that seem ripe for data-driven approaches, as well as caveats and limitations

Cortical Circuit for Binding Object Identity and Location During Multiple-Object Tracking

Sustained multifocal attention for moving targets requires binding object identities with their locations. The brain mechanisms of identity-location binding during attentive tracking have remained unresolved. In 2 functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, we measured participants' hemodynamic activity during attentive tracking of multiple objects with equivalent (multiple-object tracking) versus distinct (multiple identity tracking, MIT) identities. Task load was manipulated parametrically. Both tasks activated large frontoparietal circuits. MIT led to significantly increased activity in frontoparietal and temporal systems subserving object recognition and working memory. These effects were replicated when eye movements were prohibited. MIT was associated with significantly increased functional connectivity between lateral temporal and frontal and parietal regions. We propose that coordinated activity of this network subserves identity-location binding during attentive tracking

Carnal pleasures

Pleasures are tightly intertwined with the body. Enjoyment derived from sex, feeding and social touch originate from somatosensory and gustatory processing, and pleasant emotions also markedly influence bodily states tied to the reproductive, digestive, skeletomuscular, and endocrine systems. Here, we review recent research on bodily pleasures, focussing on consummatory sensory pleasures. We discuss how different pleasures have distinct sensory inputs and behavioural outputs and review the data on the role of the somatosensory and interoceptive systems in social bonding. Finally, we review the role of gustatory pleasures in feeding and obesity, and discuss the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. We conclude that different pleasures have distinct inputs and specific outputs, and that their regulatory functions should be understood in light of these specific profiles in addition to generic reward mechanisms.</p

Effects of conversation content on viewing dyadic conversations

People typically follow conversations closely with their gaze. We asked whether this viewing is influenced by what is actually said in the conversation and by the viewer’s psychological condition. We recorded the eye movements of healthy (N = 16) and depressed (N = 25) participants while they were viewing video clips. Each video showed two people, each speaking one line of dialogue about socio-emotionally important (i.e., personal) or unimportant topics (matter-of-fact). Between the spoken lines, the viewers made more saccadic shifts between the discussants, and looked more at the second speaker, in personal vs. matter-of-fact conversations. Higher depression scores were correlated with less looking at the currently speaking discussant. We conclude that subtle social attention dynamics can be detected from eye movements and that these dynamics are sensitive to the observer’s psychological condition, such as depression

Social pleasures of music

Humans across all societies engage in music-listening and making, which they find pleasurable, despite music does not appear to have any obvious survival value. Here we review the recent studies on the social dimensions of music that contribute to music-induced hedonia. Meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies shows that listening to both positively and negatively valenced music elicit largely similar activation patterns. Activation patterns found during processing of social signals and music are also remarkably similar. These similarities may reflect the inherent sociability of music, and the fact that musical pleasures are consistently associated with autobiographical events linked with musical pieces. Brain’s mu-opioid receptor (OR) system governing social bonding also modulates musical pleasures, and listening to and making of music increase prosociality and OR activity. Finally, real or simulated interpersonal synchrony signals affiliation, and accordingly music-induced movements increase social closeness and pleasant feelings. We conclude that these links between music and interpersonal affiliation are an important mechanism that makes music so rewarding.</p

Eye Contact Judgment Is Influenced by Perceivers’ Social Anxiety But Not by Their Affective State

Copyright © 2017 Chen, Nummenmaa and Hietanen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms

Relationship-specific Encoding of Social Touch in Somatosensory and Insular Cortices

Humans use touch to maintain their social relationships, and the emotional qualities of touch depend on who touches whom. However, it is not known how affective and social dimensions of touch are processed in the brain. We measured haemodynamic brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 19 subjects (10 males), while they were touched on their upper thigh by either their romantic partner, or an unfamiliar female or male confederate or saw the hand of one of these individuals near their upper thigh but were not touched. We used multi-voxel pattern analysis on pre-defined regions of interest to reveal areas that encode social touch in a relationship-specific manner. The accuracy of the machine learning classifier to identify actor for both feeling touch and seeing hand exceeded the chance level in the primary somatosensory cortex, while in the insular cortex accuracy was above chance level only for the touch condition. When classifying the relationship (partner or stranger), while keeping the toucher sex fixed, amygdala (AMYG), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and primary and secondary somatosensory cortices were able to discriminate toucher significantly above chance level.These results suggest that information on the social relationship of the toucher is processed consistently across several regions. More complex information about toucher identity is processed in the primary somatosensory and insular cortices, both of which can be considered early sensory areas.</p

Statistical pattern recognition reveals shared neural signatures for displaying and recognizing specific facial expressions

Human neuroimaging and behavioural studies suggest that somatomotor 'mirroring' of seen facial expressions may support their recognition. Here we show that viewing specific facial expressions triggers the representation corresponding to that expression in the observer's brain. Twelve healthy female volunteers underwent two separate fMRI sessions: one where they observed and another where they displayed three types of facial expressions (joy, anger and disgust). Pattern classifier based on Bayesian logistic regression was trained to classify facial expressions (i) within modality (trained and tested with data recorded while observing or displaying expressions) and (ii) between modalities (trained with data recorded while displaying expressions and tested with data recorded while observing the expressions). Cross-modal classification was performed in two ways: with and without functional realignment of the data across observing/displaying conditions. All expressions could be accurately classified within and also across modalities. Brain regions contributing most to cross-modal classification accuracy included primary motor and somatosensory cortices. Functional realignment led to only minor increases in cross-modal classification accuracy for most of the examined ROIs. Substantial improvement was observed in the occipito-ventral components of the core system for facial expression recognition. Altogether these results support the embodied emotion recognition model and show that expression-specific somatomotor neural signatures could support facial expression recognition