PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Philip A. Kragel
AU  - Marianne Reddan
AU  - Kevin S. LaBar
AU  - Tor D. Wager
TI  - Emotion Schemas are Embedded in the Human Visual System
AID  - 10.1101/470237
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 470237
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/14/470237.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/14/470237.full
AB  - Theorists have suggested that emotions are canonical responses to situations ancestrally linked to survival. If so, then emotions may be afforded by features of the sensory environment. However, few computationally explicit models describe how combinations of stimulus features evoke different emotions. Here we develop a convolutional neural network that accurately decodes images into 11 distinct emotion categories. We validate the model using over 25,000 images and movies and show that image content is sufficient to predict the category and valence of human emotion ratings. In two fMRI studies, we demonstrate that patterns of human visual cortex activity encode emotion category-related model output and can decode multiple categories of emotional experience. These results suggest that rich, category-specific emotion representations are embedded within the human visual system.