Decoding spontaneous emotional states in our brains.

Kragel et al. find distinctive patterns of brain activity that correspond to spontaneously experienced emotions in the absence of external emotional stimuli.  (Might this kind of work have the potential of giving us a scary ultimate lie detector test?) Their abstract and a summary figure:

Pattern classification of human brain activity provides unique insight into the neural underpinnings of diverse mental states. These multivariate tools have recently been used within the field of affective neuroscience to classify distributed patterns of brain activation evoked during emotion induction procedures. Here we assess whether neural models developed to discriminate among distinct emotion categories exhibit predictive validity in the absence of exteroceptive emotional stimulation. In two experiments, we show that spontaneous fluctuations in human resting-state brain activity can be decoded into categories of experience delineating unique emotional states that exhibit spatiotemporal coherence, covary with individual differences in mood and personality traits, and predict on-line, self-reported feelings. These findings validate objective, brain-based models of emotion and show how emotional states dynamically emerge from the activity of separable neural systems.

Figure - Distributed patterns of brain activity predict the experience of discrete emotions. (A) Parametric maps indicate brain regions in which increased fMRI signal informs the classification of emotional states. (B) Sensitivity of the seven models. Error bars depict 95% confidence intervals.