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The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles.

ABSTRACT: It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.

SUBMITTER: Wassiliwizky E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5597896 | biostudies-other | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles.

Wassiliwizky Eugen E Koelsch Stefan S Wagner Valentin V Jacobsen Thomas T Menninghaus Winfried W

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20170801 8

It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and ...[more]

PMID: 28460078

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Project description:BackgroundMajor power theories assume that social power can play an important role in an individual's goal-related behaviors. However, the specific psychological mechanisms through which this occurs remain unclear. Some studies suggested that having power enhanced individuals' goal-related behaviors, by contrast, other studies suggested that low-power individuals were associated with a greater performance in goal-directed tasks. We were particularly interested in how social power changes individuals' goal-related behaviors during an emotional face-word Stroop task.MethodSocial power was primed by asking participants to recall a past situation in which they were in a position of power (high-power individuals), or a situation in which they were lacking power (low-power individuals). Afterward, participants were asked to complete an emotional face-word Stroop task. In the task, words representing specific emotions were written in a prominent red color across a face, and these words and facial expressions were either congruent or incongruent. The participant's task was to judge the emotion of the face while ignoring the red emotional words.ResultsOur behavioral data showed that these individuals displayed faster reaction time and better accuracy in congruent conditions, slower reaction time for fearful faces and worse accuracy for happy faces in both incongruent and congruent conditions. The event-related potential analyses showed that, compared with low-power individuals, high-power individuals showed greater P1 amplitudes when faced with emotional stimuli (both incongruent and congruent conditions), indicating that power affects individuals' attention in the early sensory processing of emotional stimuli. For the N170 component, low-power individuals showed more negative amplitudes when facing emotional stimuli, indicated that low-power individuals paid more attention to the construct information of emotional stimuli. For the N450 component, compared with congruent conditions, incongruent conditions elicited more negative amplitudes for both high- and low-power individuals. More importantly, fearful faces provoked enhanced P1 amplitudes in incongruent conditions than in congruent conditions only for low-power individuals, while, happy faces elicited larger P1 amplitudes in congruent conditions than in incongruent conditions only for high-power individuals. The findings suggested that during the initial stage of stimuli processing low-power individuals are more sensitive to negative stimuli than high-power individuals.ConclusionThese findings provided electrophysiological evidence that the differences in the emotional conflict process between high- and low-power individuals mainly lies in the early processing stages of emotional information. Furthermore, evidence from P1 and N170 showed that there was also a redistribution of attentional resources in low-power individuals.

Project description:Bipolar disorder (BD) is common and debilitating and confounding effects of depression history on neural activity in BD are unknown. We aimed to dissociate neural activity reflecting past depression-load vs. present symptom severity using the Course and Outcome of Bipolar Youth (COBY), a prospective longitudinal cohort study of pediatric-onset BD. In n = 54 COBY (18-32 years), we modeled depression scores over time (up to 17.5 years) using a standardized autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model, followed by k-means cluster analysis. N = 36 healthy participants (HC, 20-36 years) were included. Using two factorial analyses, we parsed the impact of ARMA-defined past depression-load on neural activity from the impact of current symptoms on neural activity (p < 0.001, k > 30) and examined relationships with past and present symptoms (ps FDR-corrected). ARMA identified three COBY groups based on past depression-load. ARMA-defined COBY participants with the greatest past depression-load vs. other groups showed greater activity in right temporoparietal junction, thalamus, insula, premotor cortex, left fusiform gyrus, bilateral precuneus and cerebellum. In contrast, BD-COBY participants vs. HC showed greater activity in left hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and right somatosensory cortex, plus the above thalamus, premotor cortex and cerebellum; activity positively correlated with present symptom severity in most regions. Past depression-load was related to social cognition and salience perception network activity, potentially reflecting heightened attention to socially relevant distracters, while present symptoms were associated with emotion processing and reappraisal network activity, potentially reflecting abnormal emotional experience and regulation. Differentiating aberrant neural activity related to long-term depression vs. present affective symptoms can help target interventions to networks associated with pathophysiological processes, rather than long-term illness effects.

Dataset Information

The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles.

Publications

The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles.

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