Emotion is defined as a rapid psychological process involving experiential, expressive and physiological responses. These emerge following an appraisal process that involves cognitive evaluations of the environment assessing its relevance, implication, coping potential, and normative significance. It has been suggested that changes in appraisal processes lead to changes in the resulting emotional nature. Simultaneously, it was demonstrated that personality can be seen as a predisposition to feel more frequently certain emotions, but the personality-appraisal-emotional response chain is rarely fully investigated. The present project thus sought to investigate the extent to which personality traits influence certain appraisals, which in turn influence the subsequent emotional reactions via a systematic analysis of the link between personality traits of different current models, specific appraisals, and emotional response patterns at the experiential, expressive, and physiological levels. Major results include the coherence of emotion components clustering, and the centrality of the pleasantness, coping potential and consequences appraisals, in context; and the differentiated mediating role of cognitive appraisal in the relation between personality and the intensity and duration of an emotional state, and autonomic arousal, such as Extraversion-pleasantness-experience, and Neuroticism-powerlessness-arousal. Elucidating these relationships deepens our understanding of individual differences in emotional reactivity and spot routes of action on appraisal processes to modify upcoming adverse emotional responses, with a broader societal impact on clinical and non-clinical populations.

The structural connectivity matrix of synaptic weights between neurons is a critical determinant of overall network function. However, quantitative links between neural network structure and function are complex and subtle. For example, many networks can give rise to similar functional responses, and the same network can function differently depending on context. Whether certain patterns of synaptic connectivity are required to generate specific network-level computations is largely unknown. Here we introduce a geometric framework for identifying synaptic connections required by steady-state responses in recurrent networks of rectified-linear neurons. Assuming that the number of specified response patterns does not exceed the number of input synapses, we analytically calculate all feedforward and recurrent connectivity matrices that can generate the specified responses from the network inputs. We then use this analytical characterization to rigorously analyze the solution space geometry and derive certainty conditions guaranteeing a non-zero synapse between neurons.