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Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots

Emotional contagion, in particular of happiness, is essential to creating social bonds. The somatic marker hypothesis posits that embodied physiological changes associated with emotions and relayed to the brain by the autonomous nervous system influence behavior. Perceiving others’ positive emotions...

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Autores principales: Chaminade, Thierry, Spatola, Nicolas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9575595/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36262453
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871676
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author Chaminade, Thierry
Spatola, Nicolas
author_facet Chaminade, Thierry
Spatola, Nicolas
author_sort Chaminade, Thierry
collection PubMed
description Emotional contagion, in particular of happiness, is essential to creating social bonds. The somatic marker hypothesis posits that embodied physiological changes associated with emotions and relayed to the brain by the autonomous nervous system influence behavior. Perceiving others’ positive emotions should thus be associated with activity in brain regions relaying information from and to the autonomic nervous system. Here, we address this question using a unique corpus of brain activity recorded during unconstrained conversations between participants and a human or a humanoid robot. fMRI recordings are used to test whether activity in key brain regions of the autonomic system, the amygdala, hypothalamus, and insula, is differentially affected by the level of happiness expressed by the human and robot agents. Results indicate that for the hypothalamus and the insula, in particular the anterior agranular region strongly involved in processing social emotions, activity in the right hemisphere increases with the level of happiness expressed by the human but not the robot. Perceiving positive emotions in social interactions induces local brain responses predicted by the contagion of somatic markers of emotions only when the interacting agent is a fellow human.
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spelling pubmed-95755952022-10-18 Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots Chaminade, Thierry Spatola, Nicolas Front Psychol Psychology Emotional contagion, in particular of happiness, is essential to creating social bonds. The somatic marker hypothesis posits that embodied physiological changes associated with emotions and relayed to the brain by the autonomous nervous system influence behavior. Perceiving others’ positive emotions should thus be associated with activity in brain regions relaying information from and to the autonomic nervous system. Here, we address this question using a unique corpus of brain activity recorded during unconstrained conversations between participants and a human or a humanoid robot. fMRI recordings are used to test whether activity in key brain regions of the autonomic system, the amygdala, hypothalamus, and insula, is differentially affected by the level of happiness expressed by the human and robot agents. Results indicate that for the hypothalamus and the insula, in particular the anterior agranular region strongly involved in processing social emotions, activity in the right hemisphere increases with the level of happiness expressed by the human but not the robot. Perceiving positive emotions in social interactions induces local brain responses predicted by the contagion of somatic markers of emotions only when the interacting agent is a fellow human. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-10-03 /pmc/articles/PMC9575595/ /pubmed/36262453 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871676 Text en Copyright © 2022 Chaminade and Spatola. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Chaminade, Thierry
Spatola, Nicolas
Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
title Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
title_full Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
title_fullStr Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
title_full_unstemmed Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
title_short Perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
title_sort perceived facial happiness during conversation correlates with insular and hypothalamus activity for humans, not robots
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9575595/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36262453
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871676
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