Study Reveals How Neurotransmitters React To Emotional Words In The Brain

A team of scientists has released a new study revealing how neurotransmitters in the human brain behave when processing emotionally charged words for the first time.

The study, published in the journal Cell Reports, provides new information on how humans interact with language and its impact on decision-making and mental health. The research was conducted by more than 20 researchers from multiple institutions and led by Virginia Tech scientists.

“The common belief about brain chemicals, like dopamine and serotonin, is that they send out signals related to the positive or negative value of experiences,” said computational neuroscientist Read Montague, professor of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and co-senior author of the document in a public statement. “Our findings suggest that these chemicals are released in specific areas of the brain when we process the emotional meaning of words.”

Dr. Montague explained that their research suggests that the brain systems that originally evolved to help humans react to positive or negative stimuli in the environment may also be involved in processing language, highlighting the critical role words play in survival.

This study is the first to map and track the release of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine in the brain when people interact and respond to language and its complex dynamics.

Credit: Batten et al/cell Reports

“The emotional content of words is shared across multiple transmitter systems, but each system fluctuates differently,” said Dr. Montague. “There’s no single brain region handling this activity, and it’s not as simple as one chemical representing one emotion.”

To reach these conclusions, the scientists performed multiple measurements in patients undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery for multiple treatments. The patients were shown emotionally charged words—based on the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database—on a screen and the scientists analyzed neurochemical behaviors in the thalamus and cortex using electrodes.

“The surprising result came from the thalamus,” said William “Matt” Howe, an assistant professor with the School of Neuroscience of the Virginia Tech College of Science. “This region hasn’t been thought to have a role in processing language or emotional content, yet we saw neurotransmitter changes in response to emotional words. This suggests that even brain regions not typically associated with emotional or linguistic processing might still be privy to that information.”

This research could be used for future studies on decision-making and mental health, while also deepening our understanding of human behaviors related to language. A few weeks ago, another study revealed that humans preferred AI-generated poems thinking they contained more “human-like” words.