title: Amygdala and heart rate variability responses from listening to emotionally intense parts of a story.
abstract: Emotions are often understood in relation to conditioned responses. Narrative emotions, however, cannot be reduced to a simple associative relationship between emotion words and their experienced counterparts. Intensity in stories may arise without any overt emotion depicting words and vice versa. In this fMRI study we investigated BOLD responses to naturally fluctuating emotions evoked by listening to a story. The emotional intensity profile of the text was found through a rating study. The validity of this profile was supported by heart rate variability (HRV) data showing a significant correspondence across participants between intensity ratings and HRV measurements obtained during fMRI. With this ecologically valid stimulus we found that narrative intensity was accompanied by activation in temporal cortices, medial geniculate nuclei in the thalamus and amygdala, brain regions that are all part of the system for processing conditioned emotional responses to auditory stimuli. These findings suggest that this system also underpins narrative emotions in spite of their complex nature. Traditional language regions and premotor cortices were also activated during intense parts of the story whereas orbitofrontal cortex was found linked to emotion with positive valence, regardless of level of intensity.
authors.affiliation: Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus C, Denmark. mikkel@cfin.au.dk
authors.forename: Mikkel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wallentin
authors.forename: Andreas Højlund
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Nielsen
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Vuust
authors.forename: Anders
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dohn
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Roepstorff
authors.forename: Torben Ellegaard
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: Lund
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000679:Amygdala / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D055815:Young Adult