Wednesday July 5, 200615:00–17:00Hall 5CDiscussion Group SessionEpilepsy and the emotional brain

¹ A. Papanicolaou (   ¹ The University of Texas Medical School, USA )
Affective valence–specific spatiotemporal brain activation profiles: an MEG study
Regions of the brain involved in the generation of affect in response to picture sets rated as extremely unpleasant(disgusting and/or fearful), pleasant(sexually arousing), and affectively neutral, as well as the order of activation of each region, were investigated using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in a group of sixteen young normal adult male volunteers. We found spatiotemporal maps consisting of two basic components: An early one involving activation in the occipital and basal aspects of the temporal cortex, related to the perception of the stimuli was common to all three affect conditions. The second, later component, involving activation of the cingulate gyrus, the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes, differentiated the pleasant and unpleasant conditions, featuring more activity over right hemisphere structures during the unpleasant condition. These activation patterns are consistent with the notion of hemispheric specialization for affective valence and they demonstrate the utility of the MEG method in exploring both the structures involved in the generation of affective responses and the temporal order of their activation.