Sinful pleasures and pious woes? Using fMRI to examine evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge

Abstract

Traditionally, lust and pride have been considered pleasurable, yet sinful in the West. Conversely, guilt is often considered aversive, yet valuable. These emotions illustrate how evaluations about specific emotions and beliefs about their hedonic properties may often diverge. Evaluations about specific emotions may shape important aspects of emotional life (e.g. in emotion regulation, emotion experience and acquisition of emotion concepts). Yet these evaluations are often understudied in affective neuroscience. Prior work in emotion regulation, affective experience, evaluation/attitudes and decision-making point to anterior prefrontal areas as candidates for supporting evaluative emotion knowledge. Thus, we examined the brain areas associated with evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge, with a focus on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Participants (N = 25) made evaluative and hedonic ratings about emotion knowledge during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus was associated with an evaluative (vs hedonic) focus on emotion knowledge. Our results suggest that the mPFC and vmPFC, in particular, may play a role in evaluating discrete emotions.

Keywords: emotion concepts; emotion evaluation; emotion words; fMRI.

Fig. 1.

Activation during evaluative and hedonic judgments of emotion concepts relative to baseline. Figure 1A shows a lateral view and Figure 1B shows a medial view of activation in the left hemisphere associated both evaluative and hedonic judgments. Figure 1C shows a lateral view and Figure 1D shows a medial view of activation in the right hemisphere during both evaluative and hedonic judgments. All results are FWE corrected at P < 0.05 using a nominal voxel-wise threshold of P = 0.005 and cluster-extent threshold of k = 134.

Fig. 2.

Anterior prefrontal and precuneus activation during evaluative > hedonic judgments. Figure 2A shows the cluster of activation in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in the right hemisphere, while Figure 2B shows clusters of activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and midline precuneus. Peak voxels are circled. All results are FWE corrected, P < 0.05, voxel-wise P = 0.005, k-threshold = 105. Figure 2C shows neural activity in the mPFC, the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus during evaluative vs hedonic judgments. Note that the cluster of activation in the vmPFC is not statistically independent from the anterior mPFC, as it was part of larger cluster of activation with the peak being in the anterior mPFC. Error bars reflect 95% confidence intervals. Effect sizes should be interpreted with caution.