Title
Human Chemosignals Modulate Interactions Between Social and Emotional Brain Areas
Abstract
Chemosensory communication is known as an effective way to influence the human emotion system. Phenomena like food selection or motivation, based on chemical signals, present a unique pathway between chemosensory and emotion systems. Human chemosignals (i.e. sweat) which are produced during different emotional states contain associated distinctive odors and are able to induce same emotions in other people. For instance, sweat is known as a social chemosignal participating in social interaction. Chemosignal perception engages a distributed neural network which has not been well characterized yet. In this paper, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural circuits underlying social emotional chemosignal processing. Chemosignals associated with disgust and neutral conditions were used to induce specific emotional states in fMRI participants during a healthy food judgement. We performed fMRI analysis with the aim of detecting active areas in the brain, followed by a dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analysis. fMRI analysis revealed functional activity in the fusiform face area (FFA), amygdala (AMG) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In order to determine the effective connectivity among these regions as a result of emotional chemosignal processing, a set of dynamic causal models is proposed. Estimating parameters of the proposed models shows that social chemosignals modulate the connections between FFA, AMG and OFC. The results indicate that social chemosignals of disgust converge on orbitofrontal cortex - an area which is a critical region for object appraisal and valuation - after first influencing fusiform face area and amygdala.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/BIBE50027.2020.00089
2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Human Chemosignal,Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM),Effective Connectivity,fMRI
Conference
2159-5410
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-9575-9
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Saideh Ferdowsi114710.85
Dimitri Ognibene200.34
Tom Foulsham300.34
Vahid Abolghasemi427422.58
Wen Li500.34
luca citi616827.88