The ability to recognize others’ emotions is important for humans and other primates, and it is a crucial component of social processes such as empathy and theory of mind. These processes can be disrupted in various neuropsychiatric disorders, leading to difficulties in social interactions. Few studies have examined the neural mechanisms of emotion recognition, and previous work in this area has been limited by small stimulus sets and indirect measures of neural activity. This project aims to examine how the human brain recognizes the emotions displayed by others using a large, naturalistic stimulus set and direct neural recordings. This is done by engaging patients who are undergoing intracranial monitoring for medically intractable epilepsy in a movie- viewing task, where the emotions of the characters in the movies serve as the stimuli. Data from two initial subjects show that these neural recordings were able to decode the subjects’ perception of six basic emotions and suggest that the recognition of these emotions occurs in primarily temporal and orbitofrontal regions and may involve specific local field potential activity in the range of 60–100 Hz. Although additional data are required to assess the consistency of these observations, these initial results provide encouraging evidence of the potential of this method to uncover a common mechanism of emotion recognition in the human brain.
Pan, Kelly,
"Decoding the mechanisms of emotion recognition in the human brain"
(2020).
Neuroscience Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/np52-y289
