Default mode network and emotion concepts

From How Emotions Are Made
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Appendix D endnote 16, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

Other studies make a similar case for emotion perception.

A number of studies now provide evidence that the default mode network is important for representing multimodal summaries of emotion concepts. In one example, test subjects viewed moving faces and posed body postures (with faces obscured), and listened to vocalizations portraying anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. The scientists observed that neural activity overlapped in key nodes of the default mode network.[1] This experiment did not use many facial configurations or many trials, so it was probably not as powerful as it needed to be. As a consequence, only the strongest activations were visible (the rest being buried in measurement noise), revealing only the main hubs of the network rather than the network in its entirety. But it still provided reliable results, giving us confidence that the default mode network represents efficient, multisensory summaries of an emotion concept.[2]

We now also have evidence that the patterns of neural activity while constructing emotional experiences are similar to those when constructing emotion perceptions, particularly in… can you guess? The default mode network.[3]


Notes on the Notes

  1. Peelen, Marius V., Anthony P. Atkinson, and Patrik Vuilleumier. 2010. "Supramodal representations of perceived emotions in the human brain." The Journal of Neuroscience 30 (30): 10127-10134.
  2. For another example, see Skerry, Amy E., and Rebecca Saxe. 2015. "Neural representations of emotion are organized around abstract event features." Current Biology 25 (15): 1945-1954.
  3. Oosterwijk, Suzanne et al. 2017. "Shared States: Using MVPA to test neural overlap between self-focused emotion imagery and other-focused emotion understanding." Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx037.