The neural correlates of emotion ownership using biologically relevant emotional stimuli

• ¹ University of Newcastle, School of Psychology, Australia
• ² Priority Research Centre for Translational Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Newcastle, Australia
• ³ University of Wuerzburg, Department of Psychology, Germany
• ⁴ University of Tuebingen, University Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Germany

Aims: The relationship between emotion and self-awareness has rarely been addressed in neuroscience despite the potential clinical relevance of this knowledge. So far, existing studies using pronouns combined with emotion words such as ‘my fear’ have revealed that the interaction between emotion and self-other awareness develops hierarchically across several stages of processing. The aim of the current study was to determine whether using a biologically relevant paradigm of emotion processing, involving pictures rather than words, changes how these aspects of information are integrated across time.

Method: Brain potential changes were recorded for 20 healthy participants while they viewed negative, positive and neutral emotional pictures during three blocks of emotion ownership instructions. Each participant imagined themself, an unknown person or no one experiencing the emotional scenario depicted in each picture. The words ‘You’, ‘Him’ or ‘None’ were presented before each picture to prime and reinforce the referred ownership for the respective block of instructions.

Results: Rapid emotion discrimination in the visual cortex preceded ownership discrimination, with positive stimuli eliciting a significant early posterior negativity between 140-180ms. Consistent with language-based studies, personal ownership (Self and Other) elicited stronger positive potentials over parietal-occipital regions compared to no ownership at 200-300ms. Between 300-450ms Self-referential processing was significantly pronounced, but only when combined with positively valenced emotion ownership.

Conclusions: The findings firstly suggest that, for pictures, emotional valence is processed earlier in the brain than is emotion ownership, which may be a direct result of their biological relevance. Second, the findings confirm previous literature, demonstrating that self-other discrimination involves two hierarchical stages of processing, beginning with selective processing of information with any personal reference over no reference. This is followed by the selective processing of information directly referred to the Self, where it is theorised that a proper distinction between Self and Other first evolves.