DecodingHumorExperiencesfromBrainActivityof.doc

Decoding Humor Experiences from Brain Activity of People Viewing Comedy Movies Yasuhito Sawahata,* Kazuteru Komine, Toshiya Morita, and Nobuyuki Hiruma Masahiko Sumitani, Editor Science and Technology Research Laboratories, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan The University of Tokyo Hospital, Japan * E-mail: sawahata.y-jq@nhk.or.jp Competing Interests:The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Conceived and designed the experiments: YS KK TM NH. Performed the experiments: YS KK TM. Analyzed the data: YS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: YS KK TM. Wrote the paper: YS KK NH. Author information ?Article notes ?Copyright and License information ? Received May 9, 2013; Accepted October 9, 2013. Copyright notice This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Go to: Abstract Humans naturally have a sense of humor. Experiencing humor not only encourages social interactions, but also produces positive physiological effects on the human body, such as lowering blood pressure. Recent neuro-imaging studies have shown evidence for distinct mental state changes at work in people experiencing humor. However, the temporal characteristics of these changes remain elusive. In this paper, we objectively measured humor-related mental states from single-trial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained while subjects viewed comedy TV programs. Measured fMRI data were labeled on the basis of the lag before or after the viewer’s perception of humor (humor onset) determined by the viewer-reported humor experiences during the fMRI scans. We trained multiple binary classifiers, or decoders, to distinguish between fMRI data obtained at each lag from ones obtained during a neutral state in which subjects were not experiencing humor. As a