In this theme we pursuit the broad basic scientific question; "What is an Emotion?" by examining the neural underpinnings of various mental processes, such as perception, evaluation, and action, that together comprise what we as humans experience as emotions.

 

It has been widely acknowledged that emotional processing is not restricted to the limbic circuit, and is rather widely distributed among networks involved in a variety of functions, including perception, attention/awareness allocation, intentionality, motivational decision making and execution of actions. This has been demonstrated in our extended work linking emotions and facial perception (Rotshtein... Hendler, 2002), selective attention (Siman-Tov... Hendler, 2009) awareness

(Lerner... Hendler, 2012), intentionality (Eldar... Hendler, 2007), motivation (Kahn... Hendler, 2002) and more recently specific states such as, uncertainty (Zaretzy... Hendler, 2009), pain-expectancy (Ziv... Hendler, 2010), eyes-closed (Lerner... Hendler, 2009), mind-wandering (Gruberger... Hendler, 2012) and sleep deprivation (Ben-Simon... Hendler, 2015).

 

In addition, the growing evidence from brain imaging studies suggests that emotional experiences dynamically emerge through biased processing established between multiple system domains (e.g. negative valence, positive valence and cognitive control systems). To portray these system level dynamics, we use continuous naturalistic emotional stimuli, such as movie clips, musical excerpts and interactive computerized games. Using such paradigms allows us to examine the unfolding dynamics of distributed brain responses to stimuli, along with continuous self-reports of the emotional experience (Kinreich... Hendler, 2011).

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Using this approach with movie clips revealed intriguing patterns of intra- and inter-network functional organization (termed; Network Cohesiveness Index, NCI), which clearly marked distinct changes in various emotional experiences as they unfolded. In particular, we found that networks known to be involved in affective and cognitive empathic processing, inverse their patterns of connectivity as depicted by the NCI, during the viewing of movie clips at peak moments when experiencing different types of sadness (Raz... Hendler, 2012), (Raz... Hendler, 2014), (Raz, Hendler and Shpigelman 2017) , (see pics 1,2).

This specific network dynamic may also be associated with mental disorders that exhibit an impaired ability to relate to others such as autism and schizophrenia (in submission).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Using emotional music, we revealed that the limbic network is most commonly correlated with modulation of arousal-gated valence as continuously reported by individuals while listening to music excerpts. In contrast, the left fronto-parietal system (corresponding with the 'action-perception system') correlated with feelings found only among individuals with prior musical experience (at least 5 years experience playing a musical instrument), suggesting its involvement in the acquired aspect of the emotional experience when listening to music (Singer... Hendler, 2016) (see pics 3, 4). Our lab has also advanced new analytic tools that can depict the causality in dynamic network organization using a graph approach (Jacobe…Hendler and Ben Jacob 2016). Using this analysis tool we are currently examining the interplay between reactivity and regulation networks during the processing of emotion provoking face stimuli (in submission).

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In an attempt to portray the neural coding of inter-personal emotional experiences we further employed the Ultimatum Game (UG), a well known paradigm in which individuals are presented with a series of "unfair" predicaments that requires an immediate decision (to accept or reject the unfair offer). In our modified version of the UG, individuals play, while in the fMRI; in order to increase emotionality we induce anger through realistic interpersonal interactions with an opponent (sitting outside the scanner), before each new offer is made (Gilam... Hendler, 2015) (see pics 5,6).  We found that in response to unfair predicaments, individuals with a greater ability to regulate their emotions in response to unfair offers, exhibited increased ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) activity, along with decreased Locus Ceruleus (LC) activity. The on-line emotion regulation needed during high-gain decision making, caused opposing activity in emotion regulation and reactivity based systems. We thus concluded that under anger provoking situations these system interplay to support socially prone behavior. This work exhibits our recent effort to study human brains interaction with the environment including social-political contexts. We believe that under these complex interactive scenarios individual differences may be more evident and validly deciphered (Gilam and Hendler, 2016, review).

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Using other interactive game situation, we successfully depicted the dynamics of motivation systems with regards to goal directed behavior during risky situations, reward and punishment sensitivity and responsiveness.  By employing computational modeling (DCM) we delineated causality in a set of networks proposed to be related to motivational tendencies that drive goal directed behavior in animals (Gonen, 2012) (see pic 7). This study has shown that it is possible to use animal models to understand elementary processes in human motivation.