Emotion circuits
Does emotional speech synchronize brains across listeners?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When people listen to the same emotional stories, their brain activity and functional connections synchronize, especially during highly intense or negative moments.
Key findings
The researchers found that when listeners heard highly emotional parts of the narratives, their brain activity synchronized in regions related to processing emotions, language, and self-referential thoughts. This alignment was significantly influenced by how unpleasant or exciting the stories were. Additionally, dynamic brain connectivity changed across wide networks, showing that negative stories altered connections in fronto-parietal and limbic regions, while highly exciting stories modulated connections involving the striatum, amygdala, and thalamus.
Methodology
The study involved 20 healthy adults (comprising 8 males, with a mean age of 25 years and a standard deviation of 3.4) who listened to 30 spoken narratives during fMRI scanning. These narratives were each 45 seconds long, with 10 stories belonging to each of three emotional categories (unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant). To assess physiological responses, researchers successfully recorded heart rate and respiration from 12 participants. Later, participants listened to the stories again to continuously rate their subjective emotional experiences on-line, with behavioral data collected at a rate of 5 Hz.
Limitations
While the study shows that brains synchronize when hearing the same story, it does not demonstrate direct brain-to-brain alignment between a live speaker and a listener. Furthermore, the small sample of 20 participants, with physiological data from only 12 of them, limits the generalizability of these findings. Lastly, the fMRI phase-synchrony and connectivity measures are correlational, meaning they cannot establish direct causal relationships between brain states or prove the direction of neural communication.
How this study connects
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