Emotions Are Represented In The Brain In A Surprisingly Similar Way To Visual Information, Study Argues

By Emma Young Love it or loathe it, Forrest Gump has now gone way beyond introducing “Life is like a box of chocolates” and “Run, Forrest! Run!” into our vernacular. It’s been used to do something truly remarkable: to reveal the location of a map of emotions in the human brain. This new work, published in Nature Communications, shows that a spherical bit of cortex, about three centimetres in diameter, represents not only the kind of emotion we’re feeling in any given moment, but how strongly we’re feeling it. In revealing objective brain-based correlates of our feelings, the work potentially has all kinds of implications for psychiatry. Giada Lettieri at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, and colleagues recruited 12 participants to watch an edited version of the movie. Throughout, they each reported on their feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust, providing intensity ratings on a scale from 1 to 100. The team averaged out these ratings across participants during different scenes, to get an overall picture of how emotions changed throughout the movie. But as well as conceptualising emotions as discrete feelings like happiness or anger, the team also examined three measures that together could also account for how participants were feeling. The first was a measure of polarity — the positivity, or negativity, of the viewers’ emotional state at any given point in the film. The second was a measure of ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Emotion Source Type: blogs