Presented at the Mental Functioning Ontology workshop of ICBO 2012 in Graz.

1. ICBO MFO Workshop, 22 July 2012
Annotating affective neuroscience
data with the Emotion Ontology
Janna Hastings1,2
Werner Ceusters3
Kevin Mulligan2
Barry Smith3
1 Cheminformatics and Metabolism, European Bioinformatics Institute, UK
2 Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland
3 National Center for Ontological Research, University at Buffalo, USA

2. Affective science
The interdisciplinary study of:
 emotional functioning, regulation,
expression, and physiological markers
 affective disorders such as bipolar,
depression and schizoaffective disorder
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3. The Emotion Ontology (MFO-EM)

5. To define the characteristics of different
emotions start with canonical emotions
Emotion types (such as fear) show enormous variance across instances
Just as do anatomical types, e.g. human bodies
Ontology expresses what is always true… But also aims to say
something useful for representation of domain knowledge.
Solution: encode such knowledge in ‘canonical’ types
canonical Has part appraisal Has output Appraisal of
fear process dangerousness
Canonical fear results from an appraisal of dangerousness
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6. Canonical fear
fear
subtype
canonical
fear
EMOTION COMPONENT CHARACTERISTIC FOR FEAR
Action tendency Fight-or-flight
Subjective emotional feeling Negative, tense, powerless
Behavioural response Characteristic fearful facial
expression
Characteristic appraisal Something is dangerous to me
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7. Affective neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience of emotion and other
affective phenomena: studying the brain correlates
of emotional functioning in humans using
functional brain imaging technology (fMRI, EEG)
Meta-analysis: comparing the results of multiple
different experiments in order to arrive at a
consistent view of brain activation for a process in a
larger population

8. Brain imaging databases
• BrainMap, http://www.brainmap.org/: 2226 papers, 10606
experiments (~400 related to emotion)
• SumsDB, http://sumsdb.wustl.edu/sums/index.jsp, ~800
papers
• AMAT, http://www.antoniahamilton.com/amat.html, 212
papers, 675 contrasts
• Brede,
http://hendrix.imm.dtu.dk/services/jerne/brede/brede.ht
ml, 186 papers, 586 experiments
• ** fMRI Data Center,
http://www.fmridc.org/f/fmridc/index.html, 107 “datasets”
• ** openfMRI, http://www.openfmri.org/, 12 “datasets”

9. Size of the neuroimaging literature
“By the end of the year 2008 approximately
9400 fMRI studies investigating human cognition
and action will have been published in English
language journals”  and 2012?
Derfuss and Mar, Lost in localization: The need
for a universal coordinate database,
NeuroImage 48, 2009

10. NeuroSynth
Automatically assembled by text mining
neuroimaging journals and extracting
a) brain localization coordinates reported in tables,
and
b) words that appear in the papers with activation
reported in or near specific coordinates, sorted by
frequency.
But, the trouble with words is…

11. NeuroSynth

13. Cognitive Atlas
The Cognitive Atlas is a collaborative knowledge
building project (using a Wiki platform) that
aims to develop a knowledge base that
characterizes the state of current thought in
cognitive science.
• But: the trouble with cognitive scientists’
thoughts is…

17. Using the Emotion Ontology for
annotation of data from Cognitive
Neuroscience of Emotion
Study Task Annotation class in MFO/MFOEM
Recognition of gender in emotional Visual perception of emotional facial
facial expressions expressions (subClassOf perception)
Recall of personal emotional Memory of emotional episodes
memories with instructions to try re- (subClassOf memory)
create feeling
Listening to emotional sounds (e.g. Auditory perception of emotional
grunts of disgust) stimuli (subClassOf perception)
Viewing emotional film extracts Visual and auditory perception of
emotional stimuli (subClassOf
perception)
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18. Visual perception of an angry face
MF:visual perception and
has-participant some (
IAO:picture and is-about some
MFOEM:characteristic angry facial
expression )
What is the subject feeling as they perceive?
What does the experimenter think they are
studying (and what they report on)?

20. Acknowledgements
Thanks!
Emotion Researchers in Geneva
David Sander, Julien Deonna
Chemistry, Biology, Neuroscience
Christoph Steinbeck, Nicolas le Novère, Colin Batchelor,
David Osumi-Sutherland, Jane Lomax,
Gwen Frishkoff, Jessica Turner, Angela Laird
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