The interrelationship between the neurobiology of language and emotional processing in naturalistic situations

COEX 

In everyday life, language processing does not typically occur independent of emotional processing and vice versa. While valenced words, emotional prosody, and facial emotional displays are often ambiguous in isolation (as in typical laboratory-style studies), these cues are used together to reduce ambiguity about others’ emotional states in the real world. To better understand the neurobiological bases of this interrelationship, we conducted a series of studies involving functional magnetic resonance imaging acquired while 86 participants watched full-length films (where emotional cues naturally co-occur). These include investigation of 1) subnetworks for processing expletives, frequent, context-contingent, emotionally laden words; 2) the role of the amygdala (a poster child for emotional processing) in distributed subnetworks for processing valenced words in varying semantic contexts; 3) brain regions and subnetworks associated with processing valenced word, emotional prosody, and emotional face cues independently and in combinations; and 4) subnetwork predictors of individual differences in emotional traits. These studies collectively suggest that language and emotional processing are neurobiologically linked, with the brain making use of multiple emotional cues as available. This does not occur in a fixed set of ‘language’ and ‘emotional’ brain regions but, rather, in distributed and interconnected subnetworks that vary with available context.