Schedule of Events | Symposia

Intraindividual Semantic and Brain Networks Provide Evidence of Individual Differences in General Knowledge about Emotions

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alexandra E. Kelly¹ (allie.e.kelly@gmail.com), Evangelia G. Chrysikou¹; ¹Drexel University

Conceptual knowledge about emotions is inherently associated with core affect as interpreted through interoceptive sensation regarding physiological states (e.g. high heart rate, accelerated breathing). It is unknown whether and to what extent individual differences in the ability to sense and interpret these interoceptive signals affect the long-term representations of emotion concepts. In this study, we administered a semantic relatedness judgment task that involves emotion concepts and constructed semantic networks based on the participant-specific relatedness judgment ratings. These networks were statistically tested for differences based on participants’ interoceptive sensibility as assessed by a self-report scale. Differences in network topology, specifically captured by the clustering coefficient, demonstrated a relationship between individual semantic networks and interoceptive sensibility. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected during an interoceptive attention localizer task and a semantic localizer task allowed us to construct participant-specific brain networks reflecting regions underlying interoception and semantic processing. Connectivity matrices derived by correlating BOLD signal between each statistically thresholded parcel within the interoceptive and semantic networks were used to select connectivity features predictive of the behavioral semantic network metrics. Our results provide tentative evidence that emotion concepts exhibit some modality-specificity in their grounding, as connectivity between the neural resources used to process interoceptive signals and to access and evaluate generalized knowledge about emotions predicts aspects of the structure of general knowledge about emotions.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Semantic