Title: Mapping discrete and dimensional emotions onto the brain: controversies and consensus
Abstract: A longstanding controversy in the field of emotion research has concerned whether emotions are better conceptualized in terms of discrete categories, such as fear and anger, or underlying dimensions, such as arousal and valence. In the domain of neuroimaging studies of emotion, the debate has centered on whether neuroimaging findings support characteristic and discriminable neural signatures for basic emotions or whether they favor competing dimensional and psychological construction accounts. This review highlights recent neuroimaging findings in this controversy, assesses what they have contributed to this debate, and offers some preliminary conclusions. Namely, although neuroimaging studies have identified consistent neural correlates associated with basic emotions and other emotion models, they have ruled out simple one-to-one mappings between emotions and brain regions, pointing to the need for more complex, network-based representations of emotion. A longstanding controversy in the field of emotion research has concerned whether emotions are better conceptualized in terms of discrete categories, such as fear and anger, or underlying dimensions, such as arousal and valence. In the domain of neuroimaging studies of emotion, the debate has centered on whether neuroimaging findings support characteristic and discriminable neural signatures for basic emotions or whether they favor competing dimensional and psychological construction accounts. This review highlights recent neuroimaging findings in this controversy, assesses what they have contributed to this debate, and offers some preliminary conclusions. Namely, although neuroimaging studies have identified consistent neural correlates associated with basic emotions and other emotion models, they have ruled out simple one-to-one mappings between emotions and brain regions, pointing to the need for more complex, network-based representations of emotion. although there is no consensus definition of the term ‘emotion’, it is frequently defined in terms of a temporary change in affect or feeling state, elicited by an affectively salient situation, that involves coordinated, multiple systems, including physiology, brain activity, behavior, and (in humans) conscious experience. These changes typically facilitate adaptive behavioral responses, such as approach or avoidance. A key related distinction is between emotion recognition (perceiving an emotion in another individual) and emotional experience (one's own emotions). refers to the degree of pleasantness/positivity vs unpleasantness/negativity associated with an emotion. in the context of emotional arousal, refers to the strength of experienced emotion, ranging from calm to excited. emphasize that types of emotion emerge from a construction process, in which basic psychological operations, such as perception, attention, and memory, combine to create emotional meaning, influenced by social and linguistic factors. propose that emotional states can be accurately represented by a small number of underlying affective dimensions, most commonly two (arousal and valence). propose that there exists a small number of separate emotions, characterized by coordinated response patterns in physiology, brain, and facial expression. Basic emotions are a subset of discrete emotions proposed to be the most elemental and adaptive, culturally universal, and to have an inherited, biological basis in the brain. Six basic emotions have been most frequently suggested: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise. a type of coordinate-based meta-analysis used to summarize the location of consistent findings across multiple neuroimaging studies. Findings from individual studies, represented as sets of three-dimensional coordinates of maximal brain activation, are modeled as probability distributions. The degree of spatial overlap across multiple studies is then estimated, producing a map that indicates the degree of convergence of results across studies. a neuroimaging analysis method that uses powerful pattern-classification algorithms to decode information concerning cognitive and affective representations from patterns of activity distributed across multiple brain loci. This contrasts with standard analysis methods that focus on establishing relationships between individual brain loci and cognitive variables. MVPA can accurately decode the information currently represented in an individual's brain, such as information about a viewed object or information being retrieved from long-term memory. a particular psychological constructionist model of emotion that proposes that emotions arise from the combination of ‘core affect’ (mental representation of bodily changes, associated with arousal and valence) with a categorization process that determines the emotional meaning of core affect, incorporating past experience and the current situation. Categorization creates a meaningful interpretation of core affect, which can be experienced as a discrete emotion, such as fear, an affective feeling of high arousal, or even as a non-affective sensation, such as stomach upset. Although the conceptual act model has a dimensional basis, categorization can produce a wide variety of emotion states, including discrete emotions, albeit via a completely different process than in basic emotion models.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-09-01
Language: en
Type: review
Indexed In: ['crossref', 'pubmed']
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Cited By Count: 286
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