Analyzing emotions in the human brain under language stimulation

Abstract

Under the current research, it has not yet been revealed how various emotions are expressed in the brain under verbal stimuli. In order to clarify this point, we will use the Alice Dataset, which contains BOLD responses measured by functional MRI while human subjects listen to a reading of Alice in Wonderland Chapter 1 as a verbal stimulus, to investigate how sentences given as a verbal stimulus affect emotions in the human brain. First, in order to obtain the emotion ratings for each sentence, we placed 80 annotators for each emotion and obtained the emotion ratings. Next, we fine-tuned the pre-trained BERT with GoEmotions, then fine-tuned it with another 80 emotion ratings, and obtained the emotion features for each sentence. Then, we obtained the predictive brain activity for the emotional features, and investigated how the predictive brain activity responded to each emotion and discussed the results.