Granularity of emotions in brain and behavior and resilience to childhood violence exposure

This study identified behavioral and neural indices of the specificity of emotion representations in adolescents’ brains and assessed their association with resilience to childhood violence exposure. Eighty 13-18-year-old adolescents with variable exposure to violence viewed emotion-eliciting videos and rated how angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset they felt. Sixty-nine participants viewed the same videos in the MRI scanner, once while labelling their emotions and once while counting the number of people. Emotion labelling (vs. counting) led to greater BOLD activation in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC). Based on representational similarity analysis, if two stimuli elicited more similar patterns of activation within mPFC and vlPFC, those stimuli had more similar emotion ratings, suggesting that encoding of emotion categories within these brain regions is reflected in their activation patterns. Moreover, emotion granularity measured behaviorally and the mean neural dissimilarity across all stimulus pairs for each participant each moderated the association between violence exposure and psychopathology, such that the association between violence exposure and psychopathology was weaker in those with greater granularity and dissimilarity. Emotion granularity may be a feature of adolescents’ brains that contributes to resilience. It therefore may serve as a target for preventative interventions.