Enhanced bodily states of fear facilitates bias perception of fearful faces

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RESEARCH

Enhanced bodily states of fear facilitates bias perception of fearful faces Won‑Mo Jung1, Ye‑Seul Lee2, In‑Seon Lee1, Christian Wallraven3, Yeonhee Ryu4 and Younbyoung Chae1* 

Abstract  We investigated whether enhanced interoceptive bodily states of fear would facilitate recognition of the fearful faces. Participants performed an emotional judgment task after a bodily imagery task inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. In the bodily imagery task, participants were instructed to imagine feeling the bod‑ ily sensations of two specific somatotopic patterns: a fear-associated bodily sensation (FBS) or a disgust-associated bodily sensation (DBS). They were shown faces expressing various levels of fearfulness and disgust and instructed to classify the facial expression as fear or disgust. We found a stronger bias favoring the “fearful face” under the congru‑ ent FBS condition than under the incongruent DBS condition. The brain response to fearful versus intermediate faces increased in the fronto-insular-temporal network under the FBS condition, but not the DBS condition. The fearful face elicited activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and extrastriate body area under the FBS condition relative to the DBS condition. Furthermore, functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex/extrastriate body area and the fronto-insular-temporal network was modulated according to the specific bodily sensation. Our findings suggest that somatotopic patterns of bodily sensation provide informative access to the collective visceral state in the fear process‑ ing via the fronto-insular-temporal network. Keywords:  Anterior cingulate cortex, Emotional face, Extrastriate body area, Fear, Interoception Introduction Physiological feedback plays an important role in the perception of emotion [1], which is thought to be the subjective experience of a physiological reaction to emotional stimuli or a physiological reaction itself [2]. Debate concerning this concept has focused on whether a distinct physiological state accompanies specific emotions [3–5]. Recent studies propose that perceived emotion is a product not only of ascending emotional stimuli but also of the reciprocal interaction between the descending inference and internal states [6–9]. An accurate discrimination of facial expressions is important for social functioning. The cognitive process underlying emotional *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Acupuncture & Meridian Science Research Center, College of Korean Medicine, Kyung Hee University, 1 Hoegi‑dong, Dongdaemun‑gu, Seoul 02447, Republic of Korea Full list of author information is available at the end of the article

face recognition is known to be highly associated with affective disorders, such as major depressive disorder (MDD) and anxiety disorders [10]. MDD patients showed inaccurate recognition among facial expressions of six basic emotions [11] and neutral faces [12]. Surcinelli and his colleagues found more accurate recognition for fearful faces in participants with h