Granularity of Emotions in Brain and Behavior and Resilience to Childhood Violence Exposure

This study identified behavioral and neural indices of the specificity of emotion representations in adolescents' brains and assessed their association with resilience to childhood violence exposure.

Eighty 13- to 18-year-old adolescents with variable exposure to violence viewed emotion-eliciting videos and rated how angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset they felt. Sixty-nine participants viewed the same videos in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner, once while labeling their emotions and once while counting the number of people.

Emotion labeling (vs. counting) led to greater blood oxygen level-dependent activation in the medial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Based on representational similarity analysis, if 2 stimuli elicited more similar patterns of activation within those brain regions, those stimuli had more similar emotion ratings, suggesting that encoding of emotion categories within these brain regions is reflected in their activation patterns. Moreover, emotion differentiation measured behaviorally and the mean neural dissimilarity across all stimulus pairs for each participant each moderated the association between violence exposure and psychopathology such that the association between violence exposure and psychopathology was weaker in individuals with greater emotion differentiation and neural dissimilarity.

The granularity of emotions reflected in adolescents' brains and behavior contributes to resilience and therefore may serve as a target for preventive interventions.