The present dissertation focuses on the behavioral and neural substrates
of socio-affective abilities involved in the subjective emotional
experience. Socio-affective abilities are the building blocks of the more
general domain of social cognition, which represents the cornerstone of
human interactions. In particular, understanding, predicting and
responding to others’ emotional signals are fundamental aspects
necessary for the optimal functioning of human’s daily life. Emotions are
pervasively present in dyadic interactions, give color to individual
experiences, and can rapidly change over time, as they are the
consequence of an active interplay between an individual and the
environment. Despite their relevance, however, emotions are still an
open question for researchers.
Indeed, which mechanisms link descriptions of affective states to brain
activity is still unclear, with evidence supporting either local or
distributed processing. Moreover, the majority of neuroimaging studies
so far did not take into account the dynamism of affective states and their
unfolding over time. For this reason, how the temporal characteristics of
emotions (e.g., duration, onset, resurgence) are represented in the brain,
with the dynamics between specific regions related to different
emotional experiences is an open question.
In light of all this, the studies reported in the present dissertation aimed
to overcome previous limitations and answer these questions. In the first
study we used brain hemodynamic activity evoked by an emotionally
charged movie and continuous ratings of the perceived emotion
intensity to reveal the topographic organization of affective states. In the
second study, we explored the dynamic interplay between different
brain regions throughout a naturalistic situation. To do so, we related
continuous ratings of the perceived intensity of various emotional states
to changes in functional connectivity among distinct brain regions
during the watching of the same movie employed before.
Our results showed that moment-by-moment ratings of perceived
emotions explain brain activity recorded in independent subjects. Most
importantly, we demonstrated the existence of orthogonal and spatially
overlapping right temporo-parietal gradients encoding emotion
dimensions, a mechanism that we named emotionotopy. We also unveiled
the central role of the right precentral sulcus during the subjective
emotional experience, with changes in the functional connectivity
dynamics of this region being modulated by three cardinal emotion
dimensions