Brain Representations of Affective Valence and Intensity in Sustained Pleasure and Pain

This repository includes the masks of regions-of-interests, predictive models, data, and codes to generate the main figures for the following publication:

"Brain Representations of Affective Valence and Intensity in Sustained Pleasure and Pain"

Please see below if you want to use our regions-of-interests, predictive models, and connectivity maps:

• 48 ROI masks that we used for region-level information mapping (saved in ~/48ROIs)
• Masks of affective intensity/valence predictive regions across the 7 overlapping brain regions (saved in ~/fig4)
• Final models of affective intensity & valence
• Whole-brain functional connectivity maps of affective intensity/valence
• Please see 'make_figures.m' for instructions and codes. 

If you have any questions, please contact Soo Ahn Lee (sooahnlee23@gmail.com).

Dependencies:
https://github.com/canlab/CanlabCore 
https://github.com/cocoanlab/cocoanCORE
https://github.com/spm/spm12
*Note that the current study used these repositories (which are also based on the SPM toolbox) for all fMRI data analyses.

Abstract

Pleasure and pain are two fundamental, intertwined aspects of human emotions. Pleasurable sensations can reduce subjective feelings of pain and vice versa, and we often perceive the termination of pain as pleasant and the absence of pleasure as unpleasant. This implies the existence of brain systems that integrate them into modality-general representations of affective experiences. Here, we examined representations of affective valence and intensity in an functional MRI (fMRI) study (n = 58) of sustained pleasure and pain. We found that the distinct subpopulations of voxels within the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortices, the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior insula, and the amygdala were involved in decoding affective valence versus intensity. Affective valence- and intensity-predictive models showed significant decoding performance in an independent test dataset (n = 62). These models were differentially connected to distinct large-scale brain networks—the intensity model to the ventral attention network and the valence model to the limbic and default mode networks. Overall, this study identified the brain representations of affective valence and intensity across pleasure and pain, promoting a systems-level understanding of human affective experiences.