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Abstract Gradient mapping is an important technique to summarize high dimensional biological features as low dimensional manifold representations in exploring brain structure-function relationships at various levels of the cerebral cortex. While recent studies have characterized the major gradients of functional connectivity in several brain structures using this technique, very few have systematically examined the correspondence of such gradients across structures under a common systems-level framework. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, here we show that the organizing principles of the isocortex, and those of the cerebellum and hippocampus in relation to the isocortex, can be described using two common functional gradients. We suggest that the similarity in functional connectivity gradients across these structures can be meaningfully interpreted within a common computational framework based on the principles of predictive processing. The present results, and the specific hypotheses that they suggest, represent an important step toward an integrative account of brain function. 

Abstract Traditionally, lust and pride have been considered pleasurable, yet sinful in the West. Conversely, guilt is often considered aversive, yet valuable. These emotions illustrate how evaluations about specific emotions and beliefs about their hedonic properties may often diverge. Evaluations about specific emotions may shape important aspects of emotional life (e.g. in emotion regulation, emotion experience and acquisition of emotion concepts). Yet these evaluations are often understudied in affective neuroscience. Prior work in emotion regulation, affective experience, evaluation/attitudes and decision-making point to anterior prefrontal areas as candidates for supporting evaluative emotion knowledge. Thus, we examined the brain areas associated with evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge, with a focus on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Participants (N = 25) made evaluative and hedonic ratings about emotion knowledge during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus was associated with an evaluative (vs hedonic) focus on emotion knowledge. Our results suggest that the mPFC and vmPFC, in particular, may play a role in evaluating discrete emotions. 

The periaqueductal gray (PAG) is a small midbrain structure that surrounds the cerebral aqueduct, regulates brain–body communication, and is often studied for its role in “fight-or-flight” and “freezing” responses to threat. We used ultra-high-field 7 T fMRI to resolve the PAG in humans and distinguish it from the cerebral aqueduct, examining its in vivo function during a working memory task (N = 87). Both mild and moderate cognitive demands elicited spatially similar patterns of whole-brain blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) response, and moderate cognitive demand elicited widespread BOLD increases above baseline in the brainstem. Notably, these brainstem increases were not significantly greater than those in the mild demand condition, suggesting that a subthreshold brainstem BOLD increase occurred for mild cognitive demand as well. Subject-specific masks were group aligned to examine PAG response. In PAG, both mild and moderate demands elicited a well-defined response in ventrolateral PAG, a region thought to be functionally related to anticipated painful threat in humans and nonhuman animals—yet, the present task posed only the most minimal (if any) “threat,” with the cognitive tasks used being approximately as challenging as remembering a phone number. These findings suggest that the PAG may play a more general role in visceromotor regulation, even in the absence of threat. 

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals’ subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and methods. In this article, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with a set of interviews conducted with Americans from North Carolina. Although North Carolina event descriptions largely conformed to the assumptions of eurocentric psychological theory, Hadza descriptions foregrounded action and bodily sensations, the physical environment, immediate needs, and the experiences of social others. These observations suggest that subjective feelings and internal mental states may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of a U.S. (and western) cultural context has the potential to uncover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion. 

Subspace clustering algorithms are used for understanding the cluster structure that explains the patterns prevalent in the dataset well. These methods are extensively used for data-exploration tasks in various areas of Natural Sciences. However, most of these methods fail to handle confounding attributes in the dataset. For datasets where a data sample represent multiple attributes, naively applying any clustering approach can result in undesired output. To this end, we propose a novel framework for jointly removing confounding attributes while learning to cluster data points in individual subspaces. Assuming we have label information about these confounding attributes, we regularize the clustering method by adversarially learning to minimize the mutual information between the data representation and the confounding attribute labels. Our experimental result on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. 

The theory of constructed emotion is a systems neuroscience approach to understanding the nature of emotion. It is also a general theoretical framework to guide hypothesis generation for how actions and experiences are constructed as the brain continually anticipates metabolic needs and attempts to meet those needs before they arise (termed allostasis). In this review, we introduce this framework and hypothesize that allostatic dysregulation is a trans-disorder vulnerability for mental and physical illness. We then review published findings consistent with the hypothesis that several symptoms in major depressive disorder (MDD), such as fatigue, distress, context insensitivity, reward insensitivity, and motor retardation, are associated with persistent problems in energy regulation. Our approach transforms the current understanding of MDD as resulting from enhanced emotional reactivity combined with reduced cognitive control and, in doing so, offers novel hypotheses regarding the development, progression, treatment, and prevention of MDD. 

Abstract This paper integrates emerging evidence from two broad streams of scientific literature into one common framework: (a) hierarchical gradients of functional connectivity that reflect the brain’s large-scale structural architecture (e.g., a lamination gradient in the cerebral cortex); and (b) approaches to predictive processing and one of its specific instantiations called allostasis (i.e., the predictive regulation of energetic resources in the service of coordinating the body’s internal systems). This synthesis begins to sketch a coherent, neurobiologically inspired framework suggesting that predictive energy regulation is at the core of human brain function, and by extension, psychological and behavioral phenomena, providing a shared vocabulary for theory building and knowledge accumulation.