The Neural Basis of Fear Promotes Anger and Sadness Counteracts Anger.

The Neural Basis of Fear Promotes Anger and Sadness Counteracts Anger. Neural Plast. 2018;2018:3479059 Authors: Zhan J, Ren J, Sun P, Fan J, Liu C, Luo J Abstract In contrast to cognitive emotion regulation theories that emphasize top-down control of prefrontal-mediated regulation of emotion, in traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine, different emotions are considered to have mutual promotion and counteraction relationships. Our previous studies have provided behavioral evidence supporting the hypotheses that "fear promotes anger" and "sadness counteracts anger"; this study further investigated the corresponding neural correlates. A basic hypothesis we made is the "internal versus external orientation" assumption proposing that fear could promote anger as its external orientation associated with motivated action, whereas sadness could counteract anger as its internal or homeostatic orientation to somatic or visceral experience. A way to test this assumption is to examine the selective involvement of the posterior insula (PI) and the anterior insula (AI) in sadness and fear because the posterior-to-anterior progression theory of insular function suggests that the role of the PI is to encode primary body feeling and that of the AI is to represent the integrative feeling that incorporates the internal and external input together. The results showed increased activation in the AI, parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), posterior cingulate (PC...
Source: Neural Plasticity - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Neural Plast Source Type: research