Neuroscience Understanding Behavioral, Feelings and Social Signals
Abstract:
Fundamental emotions like anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise are linked to distinct feelings, facial expressions, and patterns of autonomic activity. Investigating how emotions are represented in the brain is a crucial aspect of cognitive neuroscience research. Emotions in humans can be triggered by various stimuli, including sensory cues like emotional faces or voices, as well as memories of past emotional events, such as a song evoking romantic memories. Recent research suggests that emotions and cognition are interconnected in the brain, and several brain regions appear to represent emotions at an abstract level. These regions house abstract emotional representations that aid in understanding and assessing others' emotional states, activated by the recollection of emotional events. These abstract representations are found in four brain regions: the PCC, precuneus, MPFC, and the right hemisphere's angular gyrus. Additionally, facial expression paradigms can be used to further explore and comprehend the physiology of facial recognition as a means to analyze emotional states. Furthermore, the brain can generate emotions based on the mental representation of bodily changes (referred to as "Core affect") and the recollection of past experiences (referred to as "Conceptualization").
