CCBS research team revealed association between individual variation of sociality and neurophysiological representation of negative emotions

Emotion and sociability such as mentalizing and empathy are essential components in human social life and functioning. However, little is known regards the neurophysiological pattern of negative experiences in immersive environments and how people with different sociabilities respond to the negative emotional stimuli at behavioral and neural levels.

In a study published in NeuroImage (IF: 7.4), a CCBS research team led by Prof. Haiyan Wu, revealed the association between the individual variation of sociality and neurophysiological representation of negative emotions.

The present study investigated the neurophysiological representation of negative affective experiences and whether such variations are associated with one’s sociability (Fig. 1). To this end, four types of negative emotions were included: angry, anxious, fearful, and helpless. Naturalistic neuroimaging under virtual reality, multimodal neurophysiological recording, and behavioral measures were adopted (Fig.2). Moreover, inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA) was conducted to capture the individual differences in the neurophysiological representations of negative emotional experiences. First, the researchers revealed a similar electroencephalography response pattern across these negative emotions over the parieto-occipital electrodes (Fig.3). Furthermore, the interpersonal variations regarding mentalizing and empathic abilities were found to be reflected by the neurophysiological responses (Fig. 4 & 5). These findings yielded a common pattern of neurophysiological responses toward different negative affective experiences in VR. Moreover, the current results indicate the potential of taking a sociability perspective for understanding the interpersonal variations in the neurophysiological representation of emotion.