The degree of context un/familiarity impacts the emotional feeling and preaware cardiac-brain activity: a study with emotionally salient naturalistic paradigm using DENS Dataset

Abstract

Emotion experiments with naturalistic paradigms are emerging and giving new insights into dynamic brain activity. Context familiarity is considered as an important dimensions of emotion processing by appraisal theorists. However, how the context un/familiarity of the naturalistic stimuli influences the central and autonomic activity is not probed yet [check it]. Hence, we tried to address this issue in this work by breaking it down into three questions. 1) What is the relation between context un/familiarity with the neural correlates of self-assessment affective dimensions viz. valence and arousal; 2) the influence of context un/familiarity in cardiac-brain mutual interaction during emotion processing; 3.) brain network reorganization to accommodate the degree of context familiarity. We found that the less-context familiarity is primarily attributed to negative emotion feeling mediated by lack of predictability of sensory experience. Whereas, with high-context familiarity, both positive and negative emotions are felt. For less-context familiarity, the arousal activity is negatively correlated with EEG power. In addition, the cardiac activity for both high and less context familiarity is modulated before the reported self-awareness of emotional feeling. The correlation of cortical regions with cardiac activity and connectivity patterns reveals that ECG is modulated by salient feature during pre-awareness and correlates with AIC and conceptual hub in high-familiarity. Whereas, for the low familiarity, the cardiac activity is correlated with the exteroceptive sensory regions. In addition, we found that OFC and dmPFC have high connectivity with less-context familiarity, whereas AIC has high connectivity with high-context familiarity. To the best of our knowledge, the context familiarity and its influence on cardiac and brain activity have never been reported with a naturalistic paradigm. Hence, this study significantly contributes to understanding automatic processing of emotions by analyzing the effect of context un/familiarity on affective feelings, the dynamics of cardiac-brain mutual interaction, and the brains effective connectivity during pre-awareness.