Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6015-1123

Date of Award

Spring 6-9-2025

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Cognitive Science

First Advisor

Tor Wager

Second Advisor

Michael Sun

Abstract

Emotions are a core component of human experience and behavior, yet after decades of scientific research, it is still difficult to uncover the neural substrates related to emotion. Recent advances in neuroscience have examined how we interpret emotional signals from static images of facial expressions, but less work has sought to understand how the brain constructs our emotional experiences (Chen, 2020). To investigate such idiosyncratic experiences across participants, we employed naturalistic stimuli to model the real-time, reliable changes in activity that correspond to changes in emotional experience. A primary element of emotional experience is core affect, defined as the mental representation of bodily changes, which when experienced as feelings (or with conscious awareness), constitute a degree of hedonic valence and arousal (Lindquist et al., 2012). Previous studies in affective neuroscience have discovered neural representations of valence and arousal with findings linked to amygdala, insula, thalamus, orbitofrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and subsections of the prefrontal cortex, but no previous study has utilized the movie Kung Fury in uncovering rich and reliable brain responses. Do neural representations of emotions generalize to unseen movies? Our results suggest that valence elicits robust activity in visual cortices, the intraparietal sulcus, and the cuneus, while arousal elicits activity in the precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, and intraparietal sulcus, both subsets of regions implicated in the saliency and default mode network respectively. Our findings suggest that our brain utilizes a constellation of brain regions to construct our everyday emotional experiences.

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