2025/08/12 by Gideon Vos, Vos, Gideon, Maryam Ebrahimpour +7
Computer Science · #Authorship Attribution and Profiling #Brain activity and meditation #Categorization #Cluster analysis #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computational model #Decoding methods #Dimensionality reduction #Empathy #Encoding (memory) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning in Healthcare #Neuroimaging #Prefrontal cortex #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.09337
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/08/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Understanding how emotional expression in language relates to brain function is a challenge in computational neuroscience and affective computing. Traditional neuroimaging is costly and lab-bound, but abundant digital text offers new avenues for emotion-brain mapping. Prior work has largely examined neuroimaging-based emotion localization or computational text analysis separately, with little integration. We propose a computational framework that maps textual emotional content to anatomically defined brain regions without requiring neuroimaging. Using OpenAI's text-embedding-ada-002, we generate high-dimensional semantic representations, apply dimensionality reduction and clustering to identify emotional groups, and map them to 18 brain regions linked to emotional processing. Three experiments were conducted: i) analyzing conversational data from healthy vs. depressed subjects (DIAC-WOZ dataset) to compare mapping patterns, ii) applying the method to the GoEmotions dataset and iii) comparing human-written text with large language model (LLM) responses to assess differences in inferred brain activation. Emotional intensity was scored via lexical analysis. Results showed neuroanatomically plausible mappings with high spatial specificity. Depressed subjects exhibited greater limbic engagement tied to negative affect. Discrete emotions were successfully differentiated. LLM-generated text matched humans in basic emotion distribution but lacked nuanced activation in empathy and self-referential regions (medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex). This cost-effective, scalable approach enables large-scale analysis of naturalistic language, distinguishes between clinical populations, and offers a brain-based benchmark for evaluating AI emotional expression.