A Role for the Motor System in Binding Abstract Emotional Meaning

Abstract

Sensorimotor areas activate to action- and object-related words, but their role in abstract meaning processing is still debated. Abstract emotion words denoting body internal states are a critical test case because they lack referential links to objects. If actions expressing emotion are crucial for learning correspondences between word forms and emotions, emotion word–evoked activity should emerge in motor brain systems controlling the face and arms, which typically express emotions. To test this hypothesis, we recruited 18 native speakers and used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activation evoked by abstract emotion words to that by face- and arm-related action words. In addition to limbic regions, emotion words indeed sparked precentral cortex, including body-part–specific areas activated somatotopically by face words or arm words. Control items, including hash mark strings and animal words, failed to activate precentral areas. We conclude that, similar to their role in action word processing, activation of frontocentral motor systems in the dorsal stream reflects the semantic binding of sign and meaning of abstract words denoting emotions and possibly other body internal states.

Recruitment of the left hemispheric emotional attention neural network in risk for and protection from depression

“…Increased activation in the somatosensorylingual cortex during emotional decision-making is connected in healthy controls with an individual's awareness of his or her emotional state and with the control that the language system has over perceiving of one's emotions. 59,60 Thus, we can conclude that relative to the MDD-FHP group, the HC-FHP group has more potential for paying attention to external emotional cues and to their own emotional reactions to these cues.…”

“…An increase characteristic of the HC-FHP group was also observed during both emotion processing and attention shifting in an area commonly associated with executive control, the left IPG, [53][54][55][56][57] and in a region involved in language operations, the left SuMG. [58][59][60] Both regions participate in managing emotional arousal either through focusing attention on and off the affective cues or through naming emotional states and organizing them. [61][62][63] It can be concluded that vulnerability to MDD is characterized by increased sensory reactivity to emotional cues, both when attention is focused on them and when it is not.…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…Indeed, an fMRI study investigating the processing of emotion words (such as 'joy' and 'fear') showed activity not only in limbic emotion-processing areas (such as anterior cingulate and anterior insula), reflecting the affective meaning of these terms, but in motor areas overlapping with regions activated by overt action-related words (such as "write" and "lick"; Moseley, Carota, Hauk, Mohr, & Pulvermü ller, 2012).…”

On an emotional node: Modeling sentiment in graphs of action verbs

“…In turn reflecting how mirror neurons in the brain translate spatial positions of entities into sequences of motor programs, that enable us to visually locate, reach out and grasp an object [3]. Lately neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the sensorimotor system provides a binding not only for word categories related to arm or face motion but also for verbs with an abstract emotional meaning [4].…”

“…Cognitive component analysis COCA, defined as an unsupervised learning of features resembling how we perceive the world, suggests that sensory structures can be modeled by reducing dimensionality and treating objects in space and time as linear mixtures [8]. Going beyond our initial COCA analysis of 30 action verbs [9], we here take 3 × 20 hand, face and emotion related action verbs used in the above neuroimaging study [4], and hypothesize that the force and spatial parameters which define action-based language might also be reflected in the co-variances of words underlying their latent semantic structure. And to explore to what degree these underlying structures might generalize we apply LSA based on two different large-scale text corpora HAWIK and TASA available online 12 .…”