Cerebral Topographies of Perceived and Felt Emotions

Abstract

Emotions modulate behavioral priorities based on exteroceptive and interoceptive inputs, and the related central and peripheral changes may often be experienced subjectively. Yet, it remains unresolved whether the perceptual and subjectively felt components of the emotion processes rely on shared brain mechanisms. We applied functional magnetic resonance imaging, a rich set of emotional movies, and high-dimensional, continuous ratings of perceived and felt emotions depicted in the same movies to investigate their cerebral organization. Eight main dimensions of emotions evoked during natural movie scene perception were represented in the brain across numerous spatial scales and patterns. Perceived and felt emotions generalized both between individuals and between different samples of stimuli depicting the same emotions. The neural affective space demonstrated an anatomical gradient from responses independent of specific emotions in polysensory areas and default mode regions to more localized and emotion-specific discrete processing in subcortical regions. Differences in neural activations during felt and perceived emotions suggest that temporoparietal areas and precuneus have a key role in computing the affective value of the sensory input. This affective value is then transformed into the subjective emotional experience in the anterior prefrontal cortices, cerebellum, and thalamus. Altogether these data reveal the similarities and differences of domain-general and emotion-specific affect networks in the brain during a wide range of perceived and felt emotions.