Influence of emotional complexity on the neural substrates of affective theory of mind

Marie Caillaud (1, 2) , Alexandre Bejanin (1) , Mickaël Laisney (1) , Pierre Gagnepain (1) , Malo Gaubert (1) , Armelle Viard (1) , Patrice Clochon (1) , Vincent La Sayette (1) , Philippe Allain (2) , Francis Eustache (1) , Béatrice Desgranges (1)

1 NIMH - Neuropsychologie et imagerie de la mémoire humaine
2 LPPL - Laboratoire de Psychologie des Pays de la Loire

Affective theory of mind (ToM) depends on both the decoding of emotional expressionsand the reasoning on emotional mental states from social situations. While previousstudies characterized the neural substrates underlying these processes, it remains unclearwhether the nature of the emotional state inferred from others can influence the brainactivation associated with affective ToM. In the present study, we focused on two typesof emotions: basic emotions (BEs) (e.g., angerand surprise), which are innate and universaland self-conscious emotions (e.g., pride and embarrassment), which correspond to a spe-cial class of emotions involving the self andincluding a representation of one's relativereactions to internal and external standards. Specifically, we used an ecological functionalMRI paradigm, on 21 healthy young subjects, to compare brain activations during thedecoding of and the reasoning on others' self-conscious, basic and neutral mental states.Our results showed that compared to neutral states, the inference of self-conscious andbasic emotional states from others elicited more activation in several core regions ofaffective ToM. Direct comparisons between emotional conditions revealed more activa-tion for self-conscious than BEs in the right temporoparietal junction during the reasoningprocess and in left middle occipital regionsduring the decoding process. Further analysesusing a localizer task showed that the extrastriate body area was more recruited fordecoding others' self-conscious versus BEs, which emphasize the importance of bodyclues to properly infer these emotions. Using an original task allowing for an ecologicalassessment of the affective ToM, these results demonstrate that the complexity of theemotion inferred to others can influence the recruitment of ToM network. This study alsovalidates the use of our task as an ecological tool to assess the affective ToM, constitutingan avenue for the characterization of ToM impairments in neurological conditions.

Mots clés: basic emotions; fMRI; self-conscious emotions; temporoparietal junction; theory of mind

Domaines: Psychologie; Neurosciences

Marie Caillaud, Alexandre Bejanin, Mickaël Laisney, Pierre Gagnepain, Malo Gaubert, et al.. Influence of emotional complexity on the neural substrates of affective theory of mind. Human Brain Mapping, 2019, ⟨10.1002/hbm.24794⟩. ⟨hal-02383636⟩