Mapping the Emotional Homunculus with fMRI

Emotions are commonly associated with bodily sensations, e.g., boiling with anger when overwhelmed with rage. Studies have shown that emotions are related to specific body parts, suggesting that somatotopically organized cortical regions that commonly respond to somatosensory and motor experiences might be involved in the generation of emotions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether the subjective feelings of emotion are accompanied by the activation of somatotopically defined sensorimotor brain regions, thus aiming to reconstruct an “emotional homunculus”. By defining the convergence of the brain activation patterns evoked by self-generated emotions during scanning onto a sensorimotor map created on participants’ tactile and motor brain activity, we showed that all the evoked emotions activated parts of this sensorimotor map, yet with considerable overlap among different emotions. Although we could not find a highly specific segmentation of discrete emotions over sensorimotor regions, our results support an embodied experience of emotions. Here, you will find the original code to digitise emBODY pen and paper silhouettes.情绪通常与躯体感觉相关联，例如暴怒时怒不可遏。已有研究表明，情绪与特定身体部位存在关联，这提示躯体拓扑组织皮层区域（somatotopically organized cortical regions）——这类区域通常响应躯体感觉与运动经历——可能参与情绪的产生过程。 本研究采用功能磁共振成像（functional magnetic resonance imaging）探究情绪的主观感受是否伴随躯体拓扑定义的感觉运动脑区激活，以期重构"情绪小人图谱（emotional homunculus）"。研究中将扫描过程中由自我诱发情绪所引发的脑激活模式，汇聚至基于受试者触觉与运动脑活动构建的感觉运动图谱中。结果显示，所有诱发情绪均激活了该感觉运动图谱的部分区域，且不同情绪间存在显著重叠。尽管未在感觉运动脑区发现离散情绪的高度特异性分区，但本研究结果支持情绪具身体验这一观点。 本数据集包含用于数字化处理emBODY纸笔轮廓图的原始代码。