Top Story, Diagnostics

What if we could predict emotional reactions before they happen by looking at the brain?

More complex understandings about the connection between brain activity and emotional responses could lead to better mental healthcare.

There have been many advances in neuroimaging when it comes to understanding our brains and correlation to our emotions throughout the years. But new research published in the journal PLOS biology has identified a “brain signature” that can actually predict the intensity of negative emotional responses to evocative images in individuals by looking at neural circuitry.

Lead author of the study, Luke Chang, an assistant professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth, believes these new findings could help diagnose and treat mental and physical health conditions. Chang said in a statement:

“It’s an impressive demonstration of imaging our feelings, of decoding our emotions from brain activity. Emotions are central to our daily lives and emotional dysregulation is at the heart of many brain- and body-related disorders, but we don’t have a clear understanding of how emotions are processed in the brain. Thus, understanding the neurobiological mechanisms that generate and reduce negative emotional experiences is paramount.”

For the study, 182 participants, which included college students and older adults, were shown photos of things that could be considered disturbing, like images of hate groups, car wrecks, bodily injuries and human feces, and they were also shown neutral photos. In addition to that, Chang and his colleagues wanted to look at emotional responses to physical pain, so 30 additional subjects where examined experience painful levels of heat.

By using brain imaging and machine learning techniques, they were able to identify a neural signature distributed across the brain that would predict how negative a person would feel in response to the images. In the statement Chang said:

“This means that brain imaging has the potential to accurately uncover how someone is feeling without knowing anything about them other than their brain activity…This has enormous implications for improving our understanding of how emotions are generated and regulated, which have been notoriously difficult to define and measure. In addition, these new types of neural measures may prove to be important in identifying when people are having abnormal emotional responses – for example, too much or too little – which might indicate broader issues with health and mental functioning.”

This could have major implications for helping to improve healthcare for certain individuals who perhaps react at abnormal levels.

It could also be a useful tool in criminal trials in the future when it comes to identifying sociopaths or other mental conditions in cases involving insanity defense pleas.

Photo: Flickr user Liz Henry

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