Identifying the Hierarchical Emotional Areas in the Human Brain Through Information Fusion
This work addresses the problem of understanding brain mechanisms for specific emotions based on the psychological constructionist hypothesis for researchers in neuroscience and psychology, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing theoretical analysis and methods.
The study tackled the problem of identifying hierarchical emotional areas in the human brain by addressing the limitation of traditional methods that only model pairwise relationships between brain regions, neglecting multi-region interactions and information fusion; it proposed using multi-source information fusion and graph machine learning methods, resulting in identified areas that facilitate emotion perception, basic psychological operations, and their coordination.
The brain basis of emotion has consistently received widespread attention, attracting a large number of studies to explore this cutting-edge topic. However, the methods employed in these studies typically only model the pairwise relationship between two brain regions, while neglecting the interactions and information fusion among multiple brain regions$\unicode{x2014}$one of the key ideas of the psychological constructionist hypothesis. To overcome the limitations of traditional methods, this study provides an in-depth theoretical analysis of how to maximize interactions and information fusion among brain regions. Building on the results of this analysis, we propose to identify the hierarchical emotional areas in the human brain through multi-source information fusion and graph machine learning methods. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the identified hierarchical emotional areas, from lower to higher levels, primarily facilitate the fundamental process of emotion perception, the construction of basic psychological operations, and the coordination and integration of these operations. Overall, our findings provide unique insights into the brain mechanisms underlying specific emotions based on the psychological constructionist hypothesis.