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- Title
The effect of negative emotions on functional activity of human visual cortex.
- Authors
Yılmaz, Cemre; Erkat, Orhan Batuhan; Boyacı, Hüseyin
- Abstract
Objective: Human visual perception is affected by emotions. It has been shown that the activity of visual cortex may be facilitated by the visual stimuli with emotional content. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of negative emotions on the receptive fields of visual cortex. Methods: Population Receptive Field (pRF) estimation method is to define the region of visual field to which the each unit on cortex respond and the size of this region by correlating the visual stimulus and the fMRI data collected from visual cortex. pRF protocol was applied by using three conditions: (1) images triggering fear, (2) their scrambled versions, and (3) emotionally neutral images. All the images were selected from the Nencki Affective Picture Set and grouped depending on the Basic Emotion Ratings. Those images were masked by expanding ring with clockwise rotating wedge or by contracting ring with counter-clockwise rotating wedge. The pRF estimations were compared across conditions with repeated measures ANOVA and post-hoc analyses for one participant. Results: We found that scrambled images were less successful to map visual area via pRF estimation method than neutral images and images with emotional content. The images with emotional content and their scrambled versions resulted in significantly (p<0.001) smaller estimation of pRF size than neutral images. It has been found that the reliability of emotional condition is significantly (p<0.001) better than that of neutral condition. There is no significant difference (p=0.085 ve p=0.615, respectively) between emotional and scrambled conditions in terms of pRF sizes and reliability. Conclusion: As a conclusion, the images with emotional content resulted in decreased pRF sizes in visual cortex. These results show that negative emotions enhance the activity of visual cortex through decreasing receptive field sizes since the decreased receptive field size has been related to the enhancement in the acuity of visual perception.
- Subjects
VISUAL cortex; EMOTIONAL conditioning; VISUAL acuity; VISUAL fields; VISUAL perception; EMOTIONS
- Publication
Anatomy: International Journal of Experimental & Clinical Anatomy, 2019, Vol 13, Issue S1, pS61
- ISSN
1307-8798
- Publication type
Article