Emotion Representation in Whole-brain Functional Connectivity Patterns: An fMRI Study

The representation of emotion in human brain is an important question in the cognitive neuroscience. However, it was remained unclear to what extent the connections between different brain regions contribute to the emotion recognition. The present study mainly focused on the emotion decoding based on the functional connectivity patterns. We designed the experiment and collected the neural activities while participants viewed emotion stimuli using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. We constructed the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns for each emotion, and performed emotion classification using multivariate pattern analysis combined with machine learning algorithms. We found that emotions could be successfully decoded from the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns. These results provide new evidence that large-scale functional connectivity patterns contain rich emotion information and contribute to the emotion recognition. Our study extends exist fMRI studies on emotion perception and may further our understanding of how human beings achieve easy and quick recognition of emotions.