Biology subjects

Jaaskelainen, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Jaaskelainen, I..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Psychopathic traits predict neural responses to emotional movies in the general population

Psychopathic personality traits such as callousness, manipulativeness, and lack of empathy are continuously distributed in non-institutionalized populations. Here, we show that brain responses to emotional movies in healthy females vary as a function of primary (PP) and secondary psychopathy (SP) traits. Healthy female volunteers (n=50) with variable scorings in Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale watched a set of emotional movie clips (n=39) during functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity. We found that participants low on primary and secondary psychopathy traits showed higher cortical and subcortical activity when watching emotional movies, what possibly indicates the somatosensory simulation and empathizing with the emotions of movie characters. On the other hand, the individuals with high primary and secondary psychopathy traits presented a lack of vicarious engagement during watching movies and they manifested brainstem-based heightened response towards thread-related stimuli, which could indicate potent autonomic reactivity. Overall, our results indicate that variability in psychopathic traits in the general population is manifested as differential neural responses to emotional signals, and confirm previous findings of there being separate PP and SP personality characteristics due to the dissociable brain activity patterns while viewing emotional movies.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Processing of a spoken narrative in the human brain is shaped by family cultural background

Using neuroimaging, we studied influence of family cultural background on processing of an audiobook in human brain. The audiobook depicted life of two young Finnish men, one with the Finnish and the other with the Russian family background. Shared family cultural background enhanced similarity of narrative processing in the brain at prelexical, word, sentence, and narrative levels. Similarity was also enhanced in brain areas supporting imagery. The cultural background was further reflected as semantic differences in word lists by which the subjects described what had been on their minds when they heard the audiobook during neuroimaging. Strength of social identity shaped word, sentence, and narrative level processing in the brain. These effects might enhance mutual understanding between persons who share family cultural background and social identity and, conversely, deteriorate between-group mutual understanding in modern multicultural societies wherein native speakers of a language may assume highly similar understanding.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Inferior parietal lobule and early visual areas support elicitation of individualized meanings during narrative listening

When listening to a narrative, the verbal expressions translate into meanings and flow of mental imagery, at best vividly immersing the keen listener into the sights, sounds, scents, objects, actions, and events in the story. However, the same narrative can be heard quite differently based on differences in listeners previous experiences and knowledge, as the semantics and mental imagery elicited by words and phrases in the story vary extensively between any given two individuals. Here, we capitalized on such inter-individual differences to disclose brain regions that support transformation of narrative into individualized propositional meanings and associated mental imagery by analyzing brain activity associated with behaviorally-assessed individual meanings elicited by a narrative. Sixteen subjects listed words best describing what had come to their minds during each 3-5 sec segment of an eight-minute narrative that they listened during fMRI of brain hemodynamic activity. Similarities in these word listings between subjects, estimated using latent-semantic analysis combined with WordNet knowledge, predicted similarities in brain hemodynamic activity in supramarginal and angular gyri as well as in cuneus. Our results demonstrate how inter-individual differences in semantic representations can be measured and utilized to identify specific brain regions that support the elicitation of individual propositional meanings and the associated mental imagery when one listens to a narrative.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Skilled lipreaders read and listen to lips

Only a few of us are skilled lipreaders while most struggle at the task. To illuminate the poorly understood neural substrate of this variability, we estimated the similarity of brain activity during lipreading, listening, and reading of the same 8-min narrative with subjects whose lipreading skill varied extensively. The similarity of brain activity was estimated by voxel-wise comparison of the BOLD signal time courses. Inter-subject correlation of the time courses revealed that lipreading and listening are supported by the same brain areas in temporal, parietal and frontal cortices, precuneus and cerebellum. However, lipreading activated only a small part of the neural network that is active during listening/reading the narrative, demonstrating that neural processing during lipreading vs. listening/reading differs substantially. Importantly, skilled lipreading was specifically associated with bilateral activity in the superior and middle temporal cortex, which also encode auditory speech. Our novel results both confirm previous results from few previous studies using isolated speech segments as stimuli but also extend in an important way understanding of neural mechanisms of lipreading.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

The human brain views selfish behaviour towards genetic vs. non-genetic sibling differently

Previous behavioural studies have shown that humans act more altruistically towards kin. Whether and how such kinship preference translates into differential neurocognitive evaluation of social interactions has remained an open question. Here, we investigated how the human brain is engaged when viewing a moral dilemma between genetic vs. non-genetic sisters. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, a movie depicting refusal of organ donation between two sisters was shown, with participants guided to believe the sisters were related either genetically or by adoption. The participants selfreported that genetic relationship was not relevant to them, yet their brain activity told a different story. When the participants believed that the sisters were genetically related, inter-subject similarity of brain activity was significantly stronger in areas supporting response-conflict resolution, emotion regulation, and self-referential social cognition. Our results show that mere knowledge of a genetic relationship between interacting persons can robustly modulate social cognition of the perceiver.

neuroscience↗