research findings on emotions

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• HHS Author Manuscripts

The emotional brain: Fundamental questions and strategies for future research

Alexander j. shackman.

1 Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

3 Department of Maryland Neuroimaging Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

Tor D. Wager

4 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 USA

5 Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 USA

Emotions play a central role in human experience. Over time, methods for manipulating emotion have become increasingly refined and techniques for making sense of the underlying neurobiology have become ever more powerful and precise, enabling new insights into the organization of emotions in the brain. Yet recent years have witnessed a remarkably vigorous debate about the nature and origins of emotion, with leading scientists raising compelling concerns about the canon of facts and principles that has inspired and guided the field for the past quarter century. Here, we consider ways in which recent neuroimaging research informs this dialogue. By focusing attention on the most important outstanding questions about the nature of emotion and the architecture of the emotional brain, we hope to stimulate the kinds of work that will be required to move the field forward. Addressing these questions is critical, not just for understanding the mind, but also for elucidating the root causes of many of its disorders.

Emotions play a central role in human experience and there is an abiding interest—among scientists, clinicians, and the public at large—in determining their nature, understanding their origins, and clarifying their implications for health and disease. Methods for eliciting, assessing, and analyzing emotion have become increasingly refined (e.g., Coan & Allen, 2007 ; Cowen & Keltner, 2017 ) and techniques for making sense of the underlying neurobiology have become more powerful and precise (e.g., Glasser et al., 2016 ; Kim, Adhikari, & Deisseroth, 2017 ; Urban & Roth, 2015 ; Woo, Chang, Lindquist, & Wager, 2017 ). The 10 reviews that make up our Special Issue on Functional Neuroimaging of the Emotional Brain embody these exciting developments and illustrate the tremendous progress that has been made using brain imaging approaches. Yet recent years have witnessed a remarkably vigorous debate about the nature of emotion, with leading scientists challenging the canon of facts and shared assumptions that has inspired and guided the field for the past quarter-century ( Adolphs, 2017a , 2017b ; Adolphs & Anderson, 2018 ; Barrett, 2017a , 2017b , 2017c , 2018a ; Barrett, Khan, Dy, & Brooks, 2018 ; Clark-Polner, Johnson, & Barrett, 2017 ; Cordaro, Fridlund, Keltner, & Russell, 2015 ; Cowen & Keltner, 2018 ; Fox, Lapate, Davidson, & Shackman, 2018 ; LeDoux, 2014 , 2015 ; LeDoux & Hofmann, 2018 ; Pine & LeDoux, 2017 ). As Adolphs and Anderson recently wrote,

“Emotions are one of the most apparent and important aspects of our lives, yet have remained one of the most enigmatic to explain scientifically. On the one hand, nothing seems more obvious than that we and many other animals have emotions…On the other hand, the scientific study of emotions is a piecemeal and confused discipline, with some…advocating that we get rid of the word emotion altogether.” ( Adolphs & Anderson, 2018 , p. xi).

Here we consider ways in which the Special Issue informs this scientific dialogue, focusing on what we see as some of the most fundamental questions:

• What is an emotion?
• Are emotions natural kinds waiting to be discovered and catalogued (like stars) or human concepts (like constellations)?
• Are particular emotions, such as fear, associated with distinct facial expressions and patterns of physiology, or what we might think of as biological ‘fingerprints’?
• Should we think of emotions as discrete clusters or families of ‘basic’ emotions — as exemplified in the popular Disney movie “Inside Out” ( http://atlasofemotions.org ; Adolphs & Anderson, 2018 ; Ekman & Cordaro, 2011 ; Levenson, 2011 ; Panksepp, 1998 )…
• …As points in a smooth, low dimensional space ( Lang & Bradley, 2018 ; Mattek, Wolford, & Whalen, 2017 ; Rolls, 2005 ; Yik, Russell, & Steiger, 2011 )…
• …Or some hybrid of these two extremes ( Cowen & Keltner, 2017 )?
• What develops in emotional development?
• How are emotions regulated?
• How are emotions embodied in the social world?
• Do animals have emotions?

It has been written that “science best progresses through multiple and mutually critical attempts to understand the same problem” ( Kenrick & Funder, 1988 , p. 32), and we believe that highlighting key points of consensus and disagreement among our contributors provides a useful opportunity for sharpening constructs, articulating unspoken assumptions, and identifying soft spots in the literature. In focusing attention on these key questions, and juxtaposing clear theoretical goals against the state of the science, we hope to stimulate the kinds of thoughtful discussion and creative research that will be required to understand the nature of emotion and the organization of the emotional brain. At the end of each section, we highlight some of the most important challenges for future research and some strategies for addressing them.

The Nature of Emotion

Nummenmaa and Saarimäki tell us that basic emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—exist and are associated with categorically distinct feelings, facial expressions, and patterns of autonomic activity (Nummenmaa & Saarimäki, this issue ). Barrett and Satpute reject these claims (Barrett & Satpute, this issue ), arguing that there is little evidence of specificity. Instead, they emphasize the marked differences in behavior and autonomic activity across instances of particular emotions (i.e., intra-emotion variation) and the considerable overlap across emotions (e.g., Siegel et al., 2018 ). The two camps seem to agree that emotions reflect broadly distributed neural circuits, noting that there is little evidence of consistent one-to-one mappings between particular emotions and isolated brain regions, such as the amygdala. But they radically differ in their interpretation of those circuits. Nummenmaa and Saarimäki tell us that basic emotions are associated with specific patterns of neural activity (e.g., Saarimaki et al., 2018 ). But Barrett and Satpute argue that the neural fingerprints revealed by machine-learning approaches markedly differ across studies, laboratories, induction techniques, and even across participants ( Barrett, 2018b )—echoing other recent commentaries ( Kragel & LaBar, 2016 ; Wager, Krishnan, & Hitchcock, 2018 ). Building on these observations, Barrett and Satpute tell us that emotions are not natural kinds and do not reflect invariant biological substrates, that they have no fingerprints in the brain or body. From their perspective, emotions are constructed from domain-general building blocks—cells, regions, circuits, and patterns of autonomic activity—that are not specific to any particular emotion, or even to emotion itself. The configuration of those components is held to be dynamic , exquisitely sensitive to momentary fluctuations in the external environment and the internal milieu, and causally distributed , with none of the individual components necessary or sufficient for experiencing particular emotions.

So, where do we go from here? It is clear that the last several years have witnessed important advances in our understanding of how emotions are organized in the human brain. At the level of resolution afforded by conventional brain imaging techniques, these new data make it clear that emotions arise from networks, not isolated brain centers (for related perspectives, see Casey et al., this issue ; Baratta & Maier, this issue ; Fox & Shackman, this issue ). Activation in particular brain regions, like the amygdala, explain small amounts of the variance in emotional states (e.g., as indexed by ratings) ( Chang, Gianaros, Manuck, Krishnan, & Wager, 2015 ) and emotional disorders ( Shackman & Fox, 2018 ). Individual voxels, regions, and functional connections often contribute to multiple mental states and processes, some more emotional, others more cognitive, a one-to-many mapping sometimes dubbed ‘multiplexing’ ( Pessoa, 2013 ; Shackman, Fox, & Seminowicz, 2015 ; Shackman & Lapate, 2018b ). This work also showcases the utility of machine learning techniques for discovering neural fingerprints and quantifying the degree to which they predict specific emotions, a reverse inference not licensed by traditional ‘massively univariate’ brain-mapping approaches ( Kragel, Koban, Barrett, & Wager, 2018b ; Brooks & Freeman, this issue; Lamm et al., this issue; Spunt & Adolphs, this issue; Kragel & LaBar, 2016 ; Woo et al., 2017 ).

Still, it is clear that considerable work remains. It would be premature to draw any strong conclusions about the neural organization of emotion or the prospects of discovering emotion-specific fingerprints based on this first generation of machine-learning studies ( Kragel & LaBar, 2016 ). A key challenge for the future will be to create more generalizable emotion fingerprints; predictive models that are derived from multiple induction techniques, grounded in parametric variation in one or more read-outs, and tested on independent samples (e.g., ratings, peripheral physiology, behavior) (Lamm et al., this issue; Kragel et al., 2018a ; Woo et al., 2017 ). Establishing the construct validity—the sensitivity and specificity—of these models will require comparison with a broad range of comparison tasks and stimuli ( Zaki, Wager, Singer, Keysers, & Gazzola, 2016 ), including a range of emotions ( Adolphs & Anderson, 2018 ). Doing so promises a clearer understanding of how emotions are encoded in the human brain.

Nummenmaa and Saarimäki also remind us that imaging alone cannot address the necessity or sufficiency of the regions or connections embedded within these global patterns of activation—a point made by a number of other contributors (Lamm et al., this issue ; Spunt & Adolphs, this issue; Baratta & Maier, this issue ; Fox & Shackman, this issue ). Addressing this important concern will require a greater focus on biological (e.g., pharmaceuticals, transcranial magnetic stimulation) and psychosocial interventions (e.g., emotion regulation, mindfulness, placebo) in humans (e.g., Duff et al., 2015 ; Hur et al., in press-a ; Paulus, Feinstein, Castillo, Simmons, & Stein, 2005 ; Wager et al., 2013 ; Zunhammer, Bingel, Wager, & The Placebo Imaging Consortium, in press ) and a greater emphasis on developing more integrative models in monkeys and rodents ( Institute of Medicine, 2013 , 2014 ; Baratta & Maier, this issue; Fox & Shackman, this issue; Markou, Chiamulera, Geyer, Tricklebank, & Steckler, 2009 ). Studies of neuropsychological patients with circumscribed insults are also likely to be fruitful ( Adolphs, 2016 ; Dubois et al., in press ; Feinstein et al., 2016 ; Levenson, 2018 ; Motzkin et al., 2015 ; Salomons, Iannetti, Liang, & Wood, 2016 ).

The Nature of Arousal

Arousal plays a central role in most models of emotion ( Lapate & Shackman, 2018b ), but the underlying neurobiology has remained enigmatic. Satpute and colleagues tell us that this lack of progress reflects two barriers: one conceptual, the other empirical (Satpute et al., this issue ). Conceptually, arousal encompasses a variety of systems, including those underlying the transition from sleep and sedation to alert wakefulness, those involved in activating the autonomic nervous system (e.g., racing heart), and those underlying the subjective intensity of emotional feelings. All these disparate phenomena are typically lumped under the undifferentiated rubric of ‘arousal,’ obscuring potentially important differences in neurobiology—an endemic problem in the affective sciences (Lamm et al., this issue; Fox, Lapate, Davidson, & Shackman, 2018a ). Satpute and colleagues describe an integrative framework for beginning to organize this complexity. They argue that wakefulness, autonomic arousal, and affective arousal are not categorically distinct phenomena. Instead, they seem to reflect massively overlapping substrates that are “separable in terms of their weighted contributions and functional interactions (i.e., their recipes).”

From an empirical perspective, Satpute and colleagues highlight the challenges of imaging the small brainstem, thalamic, and hypothalamic nuclei thought to be involved in orchestrating different flavors of arousal. They emphasize that “the brainstem is slightly larger than a human thumb” and contains more than 150 distinct nuclei; of these, less than 10% have been successfully identified in humans using in vivo imaging techniques. They tell us that several recently developed and emerging approaches—7 T fMRI, multiband imaging sequences, and multi-modal contrast techniques—open to door to imaging many of these regions for the first time. Satpute and colleagues make it clear that these kinds of imaging approaches will be important for understanding whether the mechanisms inferred from animal studies of arousal are conserved in humans. More broadly, when used to survey the entire brain, they also provide critical opportunities for understanding the role of small subcortical nuclei—nuclei nested within the extended amygdala, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the periaqueductal gray, and so on—in governing the function of distal regions and circuits in ways that we normally experience as alertness (or fatigue), somatomotor activation, and emotion, and—when they go awry—that likely contribute to a range of mental and neurological disorders.

The Development of the Emotional Brain

Emotions have their roots early in development and there is widespread agreement that nearly every aspect of emotion continues to change and mature across the lifespan ( Goldsmith, 2018 ; Lapate & Shackman, 2018a ; Lee et al., 2014 ; Shiner, 2018 ; Somerville & McLaughlin, 2018 ). Yet, the nature of these changes and their underlying neurobiology remain poorly understood. Here, Casey and colleagues focus on adolescence, an important and comparatively understudied chapter of life that often marks the first emergence of psychopathology and other burdens on public health and safety (e.g., injury due to risky behaviors) (Casey et al., this issue ). Adolescents are prone to more intense and labile feelings, and Casey and colleagues suggest that this reflects the asynchronous tuning of different neural circuits, beginning with the maturation of subcortical-subcortical connections early in childhood and culminating in bi-directional cortico-subcortical and cortico-cortical connections in mid and late adolescence. Ultimately, they tell us, this neural asynchrony biases feelings and behavior toward immediate threats and rewards Enhanced connectivity between the amygdala and ventral striatum early in development, for example, is hypothesized to promote rash decisions and impulsive actions in the face of emotionally salient cues.

Identifying the neural mechanisms underlying the development of emotion is exceedingly important, but difficult. Aside from the practical and technical difficulties of imaging youth, it is challenging to disentangle developmental changes in neural connectivity from co-occurring changes in hormones, cognitive control, and experience, including profound changes in stress and autonomy, as children transition to new schools, new jobs, and new kinds of social roles and networks ( Fox et al., 2018a ). A growing body of large, richly phenotyped, and publicly available pediatric imaging datasets promises new opportunities for dissecting the contribution of these factors to early-life emotion ( Rosenberg, Casey, & Holmes, 2018 ; Uddin & Karlsgodt, 2018 ), with important implications for identifying modifiable targets and developing more effective interventions for individuals in whom emotion development has gone awry (for related perspectives, see Doré, Silvers, & Ochsner, 2016 ; McLaughlin, 2016 ).

The Regulation of Emotion

We humans frequently regulate our emotions, and we do so using a variety of increasingly well understood strategies ( Braunstein, Gross, & Ochsner, 2017 ; Doré et al., 2016 ; Gross, 2015a , 2015b ; Shackman & Lapate, 2018a ; Sheppes, Suri, & Gross, 2015 ). Like emotional reactivity, emotion regulation can be viewed as both a transient state and a more enduring trait. Trait-like individual differences in emotion regulation are thought to play a critical role in childhood temperament, adult personality, and mental illness ( Connor-Smith & Flachsbart, 2007 ; Etkin, Buchel, & Gross, 2015 ; Sheppes et al., 2015 ). Silvers and Moreira extend this conceptual framework, emphasizing the distinction between individual differences in the capacity to regulate emotion and in the tendency to use particular regulatory strategies (Silvers & Moreira, this issue ). Recent meta-analyses suggest that regulatory capacity reflects biasing signals directed from frontoparietal regions to the amygdala and other subcortical structures that play a more proximal role in orchestrating emotional states ( Buhle et al., 2014 ). Silvers and Moreira highlight emerging evidence that patients with mood and anxiety disorders show intact regulatory capacity in the laboratory—indexed by the ability to voluntarily recruit these frontoparietal regulatory regions—and impaired performance in their daily lives, as indexed by the tendency to choose maladaptive regulatory strategies. Developing a deeper understanding of the nature of regulatory capacity and choice is a fruitful avenue for future research, with implications for more effectively treating emotional disorders and for more efficiently matching patients to the most beneficial psychosocial treatments (‘stratified medicine’) ( Hur, Tillman, Fox, & Shackman, in press-b ; Shackman & Fox, 2018 ).

Emotion and the Social World

Social cues, interactions, and relationships dominate the landscape of emotion in contemporary human society. The association between the social and the emotional is complex and recursive: emotional signals can elicit changes in the social environment, which in turn can influence how the sender perceives, experiences, or expresses emotion ( Fox & Shackman, 2018 ; Lapate & Fox, 2018 ). Emotional experiences are routinely shared and dissected with close companions ( Rime, 2009 ) who, in turn, play an important role in buffering stress, promoting positive affect, and repairing mood ( Reeck, Ames, & Ochsner, 2016 ; Shackman et al., 2018 ; Zaki & Williams, 2013 ). Maladaptive expressions of negative affect increase the likelihood of adverse social outcomes, including conflict, rejection, and relationship dissolution ( Shackman et al., 2016b ). In short, human emotion is profoundly social. As part of the Special Issue, several contributors considered ways in which emotions dynamically reverberate between individuals and their social environment.

From Darwin’s time on, the face has played an outsized role in in scientific models of emotion ( Darwin, 1872/2009 ). Often, the perception of the facial displays of emotion is conceptualized as an automatic ‘readout’ of specific cues (e.g., widened eyes, furrowed brow), a purely ‘bottom-up’ decoding process. Brooks and Freeman tell us about a growing body of work demonstrating that emotion perception is, in fact, often actively shaped by ‘top-down’ processes (Brooks & Freeman, this issue; Freeman, 2018 ). In this way, pre-existing expectations—including prior knowledge, stereotypes, and contextual information—can influence the construction of perceptual representations of emotional and socially relevant signals (e.g., gender, race, and personality) in the ventral visual processing stream. Put simply, our pre-existing thoughts, feelings, and attitudes can literally change how we see others, bias our evaluation of them, and change how we behave. As detailed elsewhere, this line of research is particularly exciting because it is grounded in behavior and because it harnesses machine learning to understand how seemingly ‘low-level’ perceptual representations can be influenced by expectations ( Freeman, in press ; Stolier & Freeman, 2017 ; Stolier, Hehman, & Freeman, 2018 ).

Spunt and Adolphs stake out a broadly similar position (Spunt & Adolphs, this issue ), telling us that the processes involved in detecting (e.g., widened eyes), categorizing (e.g., fear), and inferring the likely cause of emotion signals (e.g., imminent crash) occur in parallel ( Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010 ) and can influence one another in ways that dovetail with predictive coding architectures and Bayesian models of perception (Barrett & Satpute, this issue; Friston, Joffily, Barrett, & Seth, 2018 ). They highlight lesion and machine learning evidence suggesting that categorizing emotion signals (affect ‘labeling’) is an ‘embodied’ cognitive process, one that is influenced by changes in the perceiver’s momentary interoceptive state evoked by the sender’s emotional signals.

Lamm, Rütgen and Wagner focus on empathy, compassion, and other emotions that promote prosocial behavior (Lamm et al., this issue ). Building on recent work in this area (e.g., Engen & Singer, 2018 ; Zaki et al., 2016 ), they emphasize the importance of neural systems involved in vicarious or shared emotional experiences—a neural analogue to ‘embodied’ models of emotion decoding. For example, they review evidence that placebo analgesia manipulations not only reduce one’s own pain, they can also reduce empathy for the pain of others. These behavioral effects are accompanied by reduced activation in pain-related brain regions and are blocked by opioid antagonists, reinforcing the possibility of shared substrates for own- and other-directed (i.e., egocentric and allocentric) emotions. Lamm and colleagues highlight the challenges of identifying generalizable compassion circuits, patterns of neural activation that are not specific to particular techniques for eliciting or cultivating feelings of compassion. Although their focus is on compassion, it is worth emphasizing that this is a general issue for efforts to understand how particular psychological processes—pain, negative affect, cognitive control, and so on—are organized in the brain ( Kragel et al., 2018a ). Discerning whether a pattern of activation reflects these kinds of latent constructs is exceedingly difficult— Is it working memory or visuospatial change detection? Cognitive control or Eriksen flanker? Anxiety or threat-of-shock? —but can be overcome by examining multiple assays or induction techniques, either meta-analytically or, better still, within individual samples.

Animal Models of Emotion (and Beyond)

Darwin emphasized the shared origins and essential continuity of the emotions in humans and animals ( Darwin, 1872/2009 ). Although the nature and interpretation of animal emotion remains contentious, there is widespread consensus that some—though certainly not all—features of emotion can be modeled in animals ( Adolphs & Anderson, 2018 ; Barrett, 2017b ; Fanselow & Pennington, 2017 , 2018 ; Fox, Lapate, Shackman, & Davidson, 2018 ; LeDoux, 2014 , 2015 ; LeDoux & Hofmann, 2018 ; Panksepp, 1998 ; Pine & LeDoux, 2017 ; Rolls, 2018 ). This opens the door to addressing questions such as, Which neural systems are necessary for particular emotional responses? Which are sufficient? (e.g., Berridge & Kringelbach, 2015 ; Berridge & Robinson, 2016 ; Calhoon & Tye, 2015 ; Kringelbach & Berridge, 2012 ; Kunwar et al., 2015 ; Shackman & Fox, 2016 ; Tovote, Fadok, & Luthi, 2015 ). Two sets of contributors to the Special Issue focused on animal models of emotion and both teams highlight issues that are likely to be of interest to all students of emotion, regardless of their species of interest.

Baratta and Maier focus on a rodent model of stress resilience (Baratta & Maier, this issue ). Stress plays an important role in precipitating a variety of psychiatric illnesses (e.g., Shackman et al., 2016a ; Shackman et al., 2016b ). Everyone experiences stress from time-to-time and most individuals will experience at least one major trauma in their lifetime ( Husky, Lepine, Gasquet, & Kovess-Masfety, 2015 ; Kilpatrick et al., 2013 ). Yet the vast majority of individuals exposed to adversity, stressors, or trauma never develop psychopathology. These observations underscore the importance of developing a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms that confer resilience. Baratta and Maier tell us that instrumental control—the opportunity to avoid shock—has profound consequences for stress reactivity, consistent with work in humans ( Salomons, Johnstone, Backonja, & Davidson, 2004 ; Salomons, Johnstone, Backonja, Shackman, & Davidson, 2007 ). Exposure to shock that is uncontrollable (i.e., unavoidable) produces a constellation of behaviors and physiological signs reminiscent of mood and anxiety disorders. These deleterious effects appear to be mediated by serotonergic cells in the dorsal raphe. The provision of instrumental control blunts these consequences and, remarkably, can even ‘immunize’ animals during future encounters with uncontrollable stress. Baratta and Maier describe on-going work to pinpoint the circuits underlying these kinds of stress buffering effects. This new evidence suggests that incoming information about the world and the body is routed through prefrontal circuits, with some involved in detecting stressor controllability and others responsible for using that information to appropriately regulate the stress response. Interestingly, this work highlights the critical functional significance of a minor anatomical projection (<5% neurons) coursing from the dorsal raphe to the prefrontal cortex. This observation underscores the hazard of over-interpreting semi-quantitative neuroanatomical tracing studies (e.g., +++ vs. +) and prematurely dismissing the importance of ‘weak’ or ‘modest’ projections, such as those linking the amygdala to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (cf. Birn et al., 2014 ; Lim, Padmala, & Pessoa, 2009 ).

Fox and Shackman review the role of the central extended amygdala (EAc) in fear and anxiety (Fox & Shackman, this issue ). They tell us that the EAc—an anatomical concept encompassing the central nucleus of the amygdala (Ce) and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST)—is an evolutionarily conserved, functionally coherent hub; one that it is anatomically poised to use information about threat, context, and internal states to initiate a range of defensive responses and assemble states of fear and anxiety. They highlight recent imaging studies in monkeys—some including nearly 600 individuals—demonstrating that elevated metabolism in the Ce and BST is associated with heightened signs of fear and anxiety in response to novelty and potential threat. This approach, which integrates naturalistic behavioral, endocrine, and neural responses (18-fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography; FDG-PET) to ethologically relevant threats, merits comment. The vast majority of human imaging studies have focused on highly artificial manipulations—static faces, sounds, images, small monetary rewards, and so on—presented under unnatural conditions. These manipulations are much less arousing and engaging than the kinds of challenges routinely encountered in daily life ( Adolphs & Anderson, 2018 ; LeDoux, 2015 ; Levenson, 2011 , 2018 ; Shackman et al., 2006 ) 1 . As Nummenmaa and Saarimäki note earlier in the Special Issue (Nummenmaa & Saarimäki, this issue ), there are several strategies for addressing this challenge in the laboratory, including greater use of FDG-PET and a greater focus on more intense, ecologically relevant stimuli (e.g., thermal pain). An alternative approach is to integrate assays of brain function and behavior collected in the scanner—including differences in ‘resting-state’ function ( Fox et al., 2018 )—with measures of emotion and motivated behavior assessed under more naturalistic conditions in the laboratory (e.g., during semi-structured interactions or using commercially available virtual reality techniques; Creed & Funder, 1998 ; Kroes et al., 2017 ; Laidlaw, Foulsham, Kuhn, & Kingstone, 2011 ; Perez-Edgar et al., 2010 ; Pfeiffer, Vogeley, & Schilbach, 2013 ; Thomson et al., in press ) or in the field ( Anderson, Monroy, & Keltner, 2018 ). Recent work combining fMRI with experience-sampling techniques underscores the potential of this approach for identifying the neural systems associated with naturalistic variation in emotion and motivated behavior ( Forbes et al., 2009 ; Heller et al., 2015 ; Lopez, Hofmann, Wagner, Kelley, & Heatherton, 2014 ).

From a conceptual perspective, Fox and Shackman remind us that the words scientists use to describe emotion have the power to illuminate or to obfuscate ( Poldrack & Yarkoni, 2016 ; Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt, & Adolphs, 2015 ). Here, the problem is that lay people, scholars in other areas, clinicians, psychometricians, and even domain experts often use ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ in interchangeable or inconsistent ways ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ; Cowen & Keltner, 2017 ; Gaylin, 1979 ; Kotov et al., 2017 ; Watson, Stanton, & Clark, 2017 ). This problem is not specific to fear and anxiety. Our words for emotion—anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness and so on—and even more recently coined phrases, like ‘uncertain threat,’ can, and often do, refer to multiple phenomena ( Barrett, 2017b ; Kagan, 2010 ; Shackman et al., 2016b ; Wager et al., 2018 ). While there will always be a place for verbal shorthand, we urge emotion researchers to be more mindful of nomenclature and the potential for misunderstanding.

Fox and Shackman make it clear that the Ce and the BST are functionally and anatomically complex (for related perspectives, see Satpute et al., this issue ; Baratta & Maier, this issue ). Like the nucleus accumbens, periaqueductal gray, and other subcortical structures involved in emotion and motivation, they can be partitioned into multiple subregions, each containing intermingled cell types with distinct, even opposing functional roles (e.g., anxiolytic vs anxiogenic). As a consequence, research that relies on lesions, pharmacological inactivation approaches (e.g., muscimol microinjections), or conventional brain imaging techniques will necessarily reflect a mixture of cells or signals. Baratta and Maier and Fox and Shackman describe how recently developed opto- and chemogenetic tools provide new opportunities for deciphering this complexity and discovering the specific circuit components that control responses to threat and reward. While unfamiliar to many imagers, developing a basic understanding of these methods is a key step to dissolving the kinds of artificial academic silos that separate researchers focused on human and animal emotion.

Fox and Shackman suggest that the tantalizing discoveries afforded by opto- and chemogenetic techniques pose a critical challenge for affective neuroscience. Are the mechanisms conserved across species? Which molecules and micro-circuits underlie differences in fMRI measures of activation? How do they influence the kinds of distributed networks that have been linked to adaptive and maladaptive emotion in humans? “Reconciling these two levels of analysis—one global, the other local—is mandatory, if we are to develop a complete and clinically useful understanding of” emotion (Fox & Shackman, this issue ) . Addressing this challenge is difficult, but can be potentially overcome by combining focal perturbations with whole-brain imaging in rodents or monkeys.

Conclusions

Understanding how emotions emerge from the brain is a major challenge. Throughout this review, we have outlined some strategies and directions for future research. Among these, several stand out:

• The importance of developing robust and generalizable (i.e., assay- and induction-general) neural models of emotion perception, expression, and experience. Models that are firmly grounded in variation in emotional behavior or experience are likely to be especially fruitful ( Kragel et al., 2018b ).
• The importance of testing whether these models predict real-world emotion.
• The importance of understanding how such models evolve across the lifespan and how they can be implicitly and explicitly regulated by the self and others.
• The importance of testing the necessity and sufficiency of the regions, circuits, and patterns implicated in models of emotion derived from neuroimaging research.
• The importance of bridging the gap separating the mechanistic insights afforded by animal models (i.e., molecules, cell types, and micro-circuits) from human imaging research (i.e., regional activation and inter-regional connectivity).

Understanding the nature and organizational principles of the emotional brain will require substantial time and resources, new kinds of multi-disciplinary collaborations, and new kinds of training models ( Fox et al., 2018a ; Vu et al., 2018 ). Addressing this challenge is important. Some of the most common, costly, and intractable illnesses—anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, autism, chronic pain, and so on—involve prominent emotional disturbances. Collectively, these debilitating disorders impose a staggering burden on global public health and the economy and existing treatments are far from curative ( Bitsko et al., 2018 ; Chisholm et al., 2016 ; Craske et al., 2017 ; DiLuca & Olesen, 2014 ; Global Burden of Disease Collaborators, 2016 ; Grant et al., 2017 ; Hasin et al., 2018 ; Otte et al., 2016 ; Salomon et al., 2015 ; U. S. Burden of Disease Collaborators et al., 2018 ; Weinberger et al., 2018 ), underscoring the importance of accelerating efforts to understand the basic neuroscience of emotion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (DA035484, DA040717, MH076136, MH107444) and University of Maryland, College Park. We appreciate the assistance of L. Friedman, K. DeYoung, and J. Smith, as well as critical feedback from A. Fox and P. Kragel. R. Adolphs and D. Anderson suggested the Inside Out simile.

Authors declare no conflicts of interest.

1 For example, the vast majority of imaging studies that employ noxious shock allow subjects to self-select the maximal intensity, instructing them to pick the highest level that is ‘uncomfortable or unpleasant but not actually painful’ ( Balderston, Liu, Roberson-Nay, Ernst, & Grillon, 2017 ; Kroes, Dunsmoor, Mackey, McClay, & Phelps, 2017 ; Najafi, Kinnison, & Pessoa, 2017 )

• Adolphs R (2016). Human lesion studies in the 21st century. Neuron , 90 , 1151–1153. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Adolphs R (2017a). How should neuroscience study emotions? by distinguishing emotion states, concepts, and experiences. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , 12 , 24–31. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Adolphs R (2017b). Reply to Barrett: affective neuroscience needs objective criteria for emotions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , 12 , 32–33. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Adolphs R, & Anderson DJ (2018). The neuroscience of emotion. A new synthesis . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). [ Google Scholar ]
• Anderson CL, Monroy M, & Keltner D (2018). Emotion in the wilds of nature: The coherence and contagion of fear during threatening group-based outdoors experiences. Emotion , 18 , 355–368. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Balderston NL, Liu J, Roberson-Nay R, Ernst M, & Grillon C (2017). The relationship between dlPFC activity during unpredictable threat and CO2-induced panic symptoms. Transl Psychiatry , 7 , 1266. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett LF (2017a). Functionalism cannot save the classical view of emotion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , 12 , 34–36. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett LF (2017b). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain . New York: Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt. [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett LF (2017c). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , 12 , 1–23. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett LF (2018a). Emotions are constructed with interoception and concepts within a predicting brain. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 33–38). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett LF (2018b). Variation and degeneracy in the brain basis of emotion. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 108–112). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett LF, Khan Z, Dy J, & Brooks D (2018). Nature of emotion categories: Comment on Cowen and Keltner. Trends Cogn Sci , 22 , 97–99. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Berridge KC, & Kringelbach ML (2015). Pleasure systems in the brain. Neuron , 86 , 646–664. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Berridge KC, & Robinson TE (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist , 71 , 670–679. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Birn RM, Shackman AJ, Oler JA, Williams LE, McFarlin DR, Rogers GM, . . . Kalin NH (2014). Evolutionarily conserved dysfunction of prefrontal‐amygdalar connectivity in early‐life anxiety. Molecular Psychiatry , 19 , 915–922. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bitsko RH, Holbrook JR, Ghandour RM, Blumberg SJ, Visser SN, Perou R, & Walkup JT (2018). Epidemiology and impact of health care provider-diagnosed anxiety and depression among US children. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics , 39 ( 5 ), 395–403. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Braunstein LM, Gross JJ, & Ochsner KN (2017). Explicit and implicit emotion regulation: a multi-level framework. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci , 12 , 1545–1557. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Buhle JT, Silvers JA, Wager TD, Lopez R, Onyemekwu C, Kober H, . . . Ochsner KN (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: A meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex , 24 , 2981–2990. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Calhoon GG, & Tye KM (2015). Resolving the neural circuits of anxiety. Nature Neuroscience , 18 , 1394–1404. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Chang LJ, Gianaros PJ, Manuck SB, Krishnan A, & Wager TD (2015). A sensitive and specific neural signature for picture-induced negative affect. PLoS Biol , 13 , e1002180. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Chisholm D, Sweeny K, Sheehan P, Rasmussen B, Smit F, Cuijpers P, & Saxena S (2016). Scaling-up treatment of depression and anxiety: a global return on investment analysis. Lancet Psychiatry , 3 , 415–424. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Clark-Polner E, Johnson TD, & Barrett LF (2017). Multivoxel pattern analysis does not provide evidence to support the existence of basic emotions. Cerebral Cortex , 27 , 1944–1948. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Coan JA, & Allen JJB (2007). Handbook of emotion elicitation and assessment . NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Connor-Smith JK, & Flachsbart C (2007). Relations between personality and coping: a meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 93 , 1080–1107. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cordaro DT, Fridlund AJ, Keltner D, & Russell JA (2015). The great expressions debate: Keltner and Cordaro vs. Fridlund vs. Russell. Emotion Researcher. The official newsletter of the International Society for Research on Emotion . [ Google Scholar ]
• Cowen AS, & Keltner D (2017). Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 114 , E7900–E7909. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cowen AS, & Keltner D (2018). Clarifying the conceptualization, dimensionality, and structure of emotion: Response to Barrett and colleagues. Trends Cogn Sci . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Craske MG, Stein MB, Eley TC, Milad MR, Holmes A, Rapee RM, & Wittchen HU (2017). Anxiety disorders. Nat Rev Dis Primers , 3 , 17024. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Creed AT, & Funder DC (1998). Social anxiety: from the inside and outside. Personality and Individual Differences , 25 , 19–33. [ Google Scholar ]
• Darwin C (1872/2009). The expression of the emotions in man and animals (4th ed.). NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• DiLuca M, & Olesen J (2014). The cost of brain diseases: a burden or a challenge? Neuron , 82 , 1205–1208. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Doré BP, Silvers JA, & Ochsner KN (2016). Toward a personalized science of emotion regulation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass , 10 / 4 , 171–187. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dubois J, Oya H, Tyszka JM, Howard M 3rd, Eberhardt F, & Adolphs R (in press). Causal mapping of emotion networks in the human brain: Framework and initial findings. Neuropsychologia . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Duff EP, Vennart W, Wise RG, Howard MA, Harris RE, Lee M, . . . Smith SM (2015). Learning to identify CNS drug action and efficacy using multistudy fMRI data. Sci Transl Med , 7 , 274ra216. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ekman P, & Cordaro D (2011). What is meant by calling emotions basic. Emotion Review , 3 , 364–370. [ Google Scholar ]
• Engen HG, & Singer T (2018). Deconstructing social emotions: Empathy and compassion and their relationship to prosocial behavior. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 233–237). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Etkin A, Buchel C, & Gross JJ (2015). The neural bases of emotion regulation. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience ( 11 ), 693–700. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fanselow MS, & Pennington ZT (2017). The danger of LeDoux and Pine’s two-system framework for fear. American Journal of Psychiatry , 174 , 1120–1121. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fanselow MS, & Pennington ZT (2018). A return to the psychiatric dark ages with a two-system framework for fear. Behaviour Research and Therapy , 100 , 24–29. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Feinstein JS, Khalsa SS, Salomons TV, Prkachin KM, Frey-Law LA, Lee JE, . . . Rudrauf D (2016). Preserved emotional awareness of pain in a patient with extensive bilateral damage to the insula, anterior cingulate, and amygdala. Brain Struct Funct , 221 , 1499–1511. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Forbes EE, Hariri AR, Martin SL, Silk JS, Moyles DL, Fisher PM, . . . Dahl RE (2009). Altered striatal activation predicting real-world positive affect in adolescent major depressive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry , 166 , 64–73. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fox AS, Lapate RC, Davidson RJ, & Shackman AJ (2018). Challenges and opportunities for the affective sciences. PsyArXiv . [ Google Scholar ]
• Fox AS, Lapate RC, Davidson RJ, & Shackman AJ (2018a). The nature of emotion: A research agenda for the 21st century. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 403–417). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (2018). The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fox AS, Oler JA, Birn RM, Shackman AJ, Alexander AL, & Kalin NH (2018). Functional connectivity within the primate extended amygdala is heritable and predicts early-life anxious temperament. Journal of Neuroscience , 38 , 7611–7621. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fox AS, & Shackman AJ (2018). How are emotions embodied in the social world. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 237–239). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Freeman JB (2018). The dynamic-interactive models approach to the perception of facial emotion. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 268–274). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Freeman JB (in press). Doing psychological science by hand. Current Driections in Psychological Science . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Friston KJ, Joffily M, Barrett LF, & Seth AK (2018). Active inference and emotion. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 28–33). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gaylin W (1979). Feelings: Our vital signs . NY: Harper & Row. [ Google Scholar ]
• Glasser MF, Smith SM, Marcus DS, Andersson JL, Auerbach EJ, Behrens TE, . . . Van Essen DC (2016). The Human Connectome Project’s neuroimaging approach. Nature Neuroscience , 19 , 1175–1187. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Global Burden of Disease Collaborators. (2016). Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 310 diseases and injuries, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015. Lancet , 388 , 1545–1602. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Goldsmith HH (2018). Everything develops during emotional development. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 376–379). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Grant BF, Chou SP, Saha TD, Pickering RP, Kerridge BT, Ruan WJ, . . . Hasin DS (2017). Prevalence of 12-month alcohol use, high-risk drinking, and DSM-IV Alcohol Use Disorder in the United States, 2001–2002 to 2012–2013: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. JAMA Psychiatry , 74 , 911–923. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gross JJ (2015a). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry , 26 , 1–26. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gross JJ (2015b). The extended process model of emotion regulation: Elaborations, applications, and future directions. Psychological Inquiry , 26 , 130–137. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hasin DS, Sarvet AL, Meyers JL, Saha TD, Ruan WJ, Stohl M, & Grant BF (2018). Epidemiology of Adult DSM-5 Major Depressive Disorder and Its Specifiers in the United States. JAMA Psychiatry . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Heller AS, Fox AS, Wing E, Mayer K, Vack NJ, & Davidson RJ (2015). The neurodynamics of affect in the laboratory predicts persistence of real-world emotional responses. Journal of Neuroscience , 35 , 10503–10509. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hur J, Kaplan CM, Smith JF, Bradford DE, Fox AS, Curtin JJ, & Shackman AJ (in press-a). Acute alcohol administration dampens central extended amygdala reactivity. Scientific Reports . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hur J, Tillman RM, Fox AS, & Shackman AJ (in press-b). The value of clinical and translational neuroscience approaches to psychiatric illness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Husky MM, Lepine JP, Gasquet I, & Kovess-Masfety V (2015). Exposure to traumatic events and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in France: Results from the WMH survey. Journal of Traumatic Stress , 28 , 275–282. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Institute of Medicine. (2013). Improving the utility and translation of animal models for nervous system disorders: Workshop summary . Washington, DC: National Academies Press. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Institute of Medicine. (2014). Improving and accelerating therapeutic development for nervous system disorders . Washington, DC: National Academies Press. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kagan J (2010). Some plain words on emotion. Emotion Review , 3 , 221–224. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kenrick DT, & Funder DC (1988). Profiting from controversy. Lessons from the person-situation debate. American Psychologist , 43 , 23–34. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kilpatrick DG, Resnick HS, Milanak ME, Miller MW, Keyes KM, & Friedman MJ (2013). National estimates of exposure to traumatic events and PTSD prevalence using DSM-IV and DSM-5 criteria. Journal of Traumatic Stress , 26 , 537–547. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kim CK, Adhikari A, & Deisseroth K (2017). Integration of optogenetics with complementary methodologies in systems neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience , 18 , 222–235. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kotov R, Krueger RF, Watson D, Achenbach TM, Althoff RR, Bagby RM, . . . Zimmerman M (2017). The hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology , 126 , 454–477. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kragel PA, Kano M, Van Oudenhove L, Ly HG, Dupont P, Rubio A, . . . Wager TD (2018a). Generalizable representations of pain, cognitive control, and negative emotion in medial frontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience , 21 , 283–289. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kragel PA, Koban L, Barrett LF, & Wager TD (2018b). Representation, pattern information, and brain signatures: From neurons to neuroimaging. Neuron , 99 , 257–273. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kragel PA, & LaBar KS (2016). Decoding the nature of emotion in the brain. Trends Cogn Sci , 20 , 444–455. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kringelbach ML, & Berridge KC (2012). The joyful mind. Scientific American , 307 , 40–45. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kroes MCW, Dunsmoor JE, Mackey WE, McClay M, & Phelps EA (2017). Context conditioning in humans using commercially available immersive Virtual Reality. Sci Rep , 7 , 8640. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kunwar PS, Zelikowsky M, Remedios R, Cai H, Yilmaz M, Meister M, & Anderson DJ (2015). Ventromedial hypothalamic neurons control a defensive emotion state. Elife , 4 . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Laidlaw KE, Foulsham T, Kuhn G, & Kingstone A (2011). Potential social interactions are important to social attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 108 , 5548–5553. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lang PJ, & Bradley MM (2018). What is an emotion? A natural science perspective. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 11–14). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lapate RC, & Fox AS (2018). How and why are emotions communicated? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 274–276). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lapate RC, & Shackman AJ (2018a). What develops in emotional development? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 399–401). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lapate RC, & Shackman AJ (2018b). What is an emotion? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 38–43). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• LeDoux JE (2014). Coming to terms with fear. Proceedings of the National Acadademy of Sciences U S A , 111 , 2871–2878. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• LeDoux JE (2015). Anxious. Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety . New York, NY: Viking. [ Google Scholar ]
• LeDoux JE, & Hofmann SG (2018). The subjective experience of emotion: a fearful view. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences , 19 , 1–6. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lee FS, Heimer H, Giedd JN, Lein ES, Sestan N, Weinberger DR, & Casey BJ (2014). Mental health. Adolescent mental health--opportunity and obligation. Science , 346 , 547–549. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Levenson RW (2011). Basic emotion questions. Emotion Review , 3 , 379–386. [ Google Scholar ]
• Levenson RW (2018). What is the added value of studying the brain for understanding emotion? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 80–84). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lim SL, Padmala S, & Pessoa L (2009). Segregating the significant from the mundane on a moment-to-moment basis via direct and indirect amygdala contributions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 106 , 16841–16846. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lopez RB, Hofmann W, Wagner DD, Kelley WM, & Heatherton TF (2014). Neural predictors of giving in to temptation in daily life. Psychol Sci , 25 ( 7 ), 1337–1344. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Markou A, Chiamulera C, Geyer MA, Tricklebank M, & Steckler T (2009). Removing obstacles in neuroscience drug discovery: the future path for animal models. Neuropsychopharmacology , 34 , 74–89. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mattek AM, Wolford GL, & Whalen PJ (2017). A mathematical model captures the structure of subjective affect. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 12 , 508–526. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• McLaughlin KA (2016). Future directions in childhood adversity and youth psychopathology. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology , 45 , 361–382. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Motzkin JC, Philippi CL, Oler JA, Kalin NH, Baskaya MK, & Koenigs M (2015). Ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage alters resting blood flow to the bed nucleus of stria terminalis. Cortex , 64 , 281–288. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Najafi M, Kinnison J, & Pessoa L (2017). Intersubject brain network organization during dynamic anxious anticipation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , 11 . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Otte C, Gold SM, Penninx BW, Pariante CM, Etkin A, Fava M, . . . Schatzberg AF (2016). Major depressive disorder. Nat Rev Dis Primers , 2 , 16065. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Panksepp J (1998). Affective neuroscience. The foundations of human and animal emotions . New York: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Paulus MP, Feinstein JS, Castillo G, Simmons AN, & Stein MB (2005). Dose-dependent decrease of activation in bilateral amygdala and insula by lorazepam during emotion processing. Archives of General Psychiatry , 62 , 282–288. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Perez-Edgar K, McDermott JN, Korelitz K, Degnan KA, Curby TW, Pine DS, & Fox NA (2010). Patterns of sustained attention in infancy shape the developmental trajectory of social behavior from toddlerhood through adolescence. Developmental Psychology , 46 , 1723–1730. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pessoa L (2013). The cognitive-emotional brain: From interactions to integration . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Pessoa L, & Adolphs R (2010). Emotion processing and the amygdala: from a ‘low road’ to ‘many roads’ of evaluating biological significance. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience , 11 , 773–783. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pfeiffer UJ, Vogeley K, & Schilbach L (2013). From gaze cueing to dual eye-tracking: novel approaches to investigate the neural correlates of gaze in social interaction. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews , 37 , 2516–2528. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pine DS, & LeDoux JE (2017). Elevating the role of subjective experience in the clinic: Response to Fanselow and Pennington. American Journal of Psychiatry , 174 , 1121–1122. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Poldrack RA, & Yarkoni T (2016). From brain maps to cognitive ontologies: Informatics and the search for mental structure. Annual Review of Psychology , 67 , 587–612. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Reeck C, Ames DR, & Ochsner KN (2016). The social regulation of emotion: An integrative, cross-disciplinary model. Trends Cogn Sci , 20 , 47–63. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rime B (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review. Emotion Review , 1 , 60–85. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rolls ET (2005). Emotion explained . NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rolls ET (2018). What are emotional states and what are their functions. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 19–28). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rosenberg MD, Casey BJ, & Holmes AJ (2018). Prediction complements explanation in understanding the developing brain. Nat Commun , 9 , 589. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Saarimaki H, Ejtehadian LF, Glerean E, Jaaskelainen IP, Vuilleumier P, Sams M, & Nummenmaa L (2018). Distributed affective space represents multiple emotion categories across the human brain. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci , 13 , 471–482. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Salomon JA, Haagsma JA, Davis A, de Noordhout CM, Polinder S, Havelaar AH, . . . Vos T (2015). Disability weights for the Global Burden of Disease 2013 study. Lancet Glob Health , 3 , e712–723. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Salomons TV, Iannetti GD, Liang M, & Wood JN (2016). The “pain matrix” in pain-free individuals. JAMA Neurol , 73 , 755–756. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Salomons TV, Johnstone T, Backonja MM, & Davidson RJ (2004). Perceived controllability modulates the neural response to pain. Journal of Neuroscience , 24 , 7199–7203. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Salomons TV, Johnstone T, Backonja MM, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (2007). Individual differences in the effects of perceived controllability on pain perception: critical role of the prefrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 19 , 993–1003. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schaafsma SM, Pfaff DW, Spunt RP, & Adolphs R (2015). Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of mind. Trends Cogn Sci , 19 , 65–72. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, & Fox AS (2016). Contributions of the central extended amygdala to fear and anxiety. Journal of Neuroscience , 36 , 8050–8063. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, & Fox AS (2018). Getting serious about variation: Lessons for clinical neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 22 , 368–369. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, Fox AS, & Seminowicz DA (2015). The cognitive-emotional brain: Opportunities and challenges for understanding neuropsychiatric disorders. Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 38 , e86. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, Kaplan CM, Stockbridge MD, Tillman RM, Tromp DPM, Fox AS, & Gamer M (2016a). The neurobiology of anxiety and attentional biases to threat: Implications for understanding anxiety disorders in adults and youth. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology , 7 , 311–342. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, & Lapate RC (2018a). How are emotions regulated by context and cognition? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 177–179). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, & Lapate RC (2018b). How do emotion and cognition interact? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 209–211). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, Sarinopoulos I, Maxwell JS, Pizzagalli DA, Lavric A, & Davidson RJ (2006). Anxiety selectively disrupts visuospatial working memory. Emotion , 6 , 40–61. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, Tromp DPM, Stockbridge MD, Kaplan CM, Tillman RM, & Fox AS (2016b). Dispositional negativity: An integrative psychological and neurobiological perspective. Psychological Bulletin , 142 , 1275–1314. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shackman AJ, Weinstein JS, Hudja SN, Bloomer CD, Barstead MG, Fox AS, & Lemay EP (2018). Dispositional negativity in the wild: Social environment governs momentary emotional experience. Emotion , 18 , 707–724. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sheppes G, Suri G, & Gross JJ (2015). Emotion regulation and psychopathology. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology , 11 , 379–405. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shiner RL (2018). Stability and change in emotion-relevant personality traits in childhood and adolescence. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 61–64). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Siegel EH, Sands MK, Van den Noortgate W, Condon P, Chang Y, Dy J, . . . Barrett LF (2018). Emotion fingerprints or emotion populations? A meta-analytic investigation of autonomic features of emotion categories. Psychological Bulletin , 144 , 343–393. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Somerville LH, & McLaughlin KA (2018). Normative trajectories and sources of psychopathology risk in adolescence. In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (2nd ed., pp. 382–386). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Stolier RM, & Freeman JB (2017). A neural mechanism of social categorization. Journal of Neuroscience , 37 , 5711–5721. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stolier RM, Hehman E, & Freeman JB (2018). A dynamic structure of social trait space. Trends Cogn Sci , 22 , 197–200. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thomson ND, Aboutanos M, Kiehl KA, Neumann C, Galusha C, & Fanti KA (in press). Physiological reactivity in response to a fear-induced virtual reality experience: Associations with psychopathic traits. Psychophysiology , e13276. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tovote P, Fadok JP, & Luthi A (2015). Neuronal circuits for fear and anxiety. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience , 16 , 317–331. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• U. S. Burden of Disease Collaborators, Mokdad AH, Ballestros K, Echko M, Glenn S, Olsen HE, . . . Murray CJL (2018). The State of US Health, 1990–2016: Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Among US States. JAMA , 319 , 1444–1472. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Uddin LQ, & Karlsgodt KH (2018). Future directions for examination of brain networks in neurodevelopmental disorders. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology , 47 , 483–497. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Urban DJ, & Roth BL (2015). DREADDs (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs): chemogenetic tools with therapeutic utility. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology , 55 , 399–417. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Vu MT, Adali T, Ba D, Buzsaki G, Carlson D, Heller K, . . . Dzirasa K (2018). A shared vision for machine learning in neuroscience. Journal of Neuroscience , 38 , 1601–1607. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wager TD, Atlas LY, Lindquist MA, Roy M, Woo CW, & Kross E (2013). An fMRI-based neurologic signature of physical pain. New England Journal of Medicine , 368 , 1388–1397. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wager TD, Krishnan A, & Hitchcock E (2018). How are emotions organized in the brain? In Fox AS, Lapate RC, Shackman AJ, & Davidson RJ (Eds.), The nature of emotion. Fundamental questions (pp. 112–118). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Watson D, Stanton K, & Clark LA (2017). Self-report indicators of negative valence constructs within the research domain criteria (RDoC): A critical review. Journal of Affective Disorders , 216 , 58–69. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Weinberger AH, Gbedemah M, Martinez AM, Nash D, Galea S, & Goodwin RD (2018). Trends in depression prevalence in the USA from 2005 to 2015: widening disparities in vulnerable groups. Psychological Medicine , 48 , 1308–1315. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Woo CW, Chang LJ, Lindquist MA, & Wager TD (2017). Building better biomarkers: brain models in translational neuroimaging. Nature Neuroscience , 20 , 365–377. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Yik M, Russell JA, & Steiger JH (2011). A 12-point circumplex structure of core affect. Emotion , 11 , 705–731. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zaki J, Wager TD, Singer T, Keysers C, & Gazzola V (2016). The anatomy of suffering: Understanding the relationship between nociceptive and empathic pain. Trends Cogn Sci , 20 , 249–259. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zaki J, & Williams WC (2013). Interpersonal emotion regulation. Emotion , 13 , 803–810. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zunhammer M, Bingel U, Wager TD, & The Placebo Imaging Consortium. (in press). Placebo effects on the neurologic pain signature: A meta-analysis of individual participant functional magnetic resonance imaging data. JAMA Neurol . [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• Ethnic Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

2 What the Empirical Evidence Suggests

• Published: February 2018
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

Now that the study of emotions has emerged as a thriving field of interdisciplinary research, social psychology and neuroscience have been sources of evidence informing theoretical accounts. One issue is whether emotion and cognition are discrete and emotions thus noncognitive responses. Many philosophers have argued that emotions are independent of “higher” cognition, based upon some neuroscientific findings. Yet they have been too hasty in appropriating indefinite evidence to justify sweeping conclusions: a closer look shows that empirical research does not justify their views. Social psychology has done more to show how closely emotions are correlated with particular bodily states, and this evidence must be taken into account. The role of the living body in our affective experience must be acknowledged, since it is through our living, feeling bodies that we emotionally recognize significant aspects of situations. The embodied phenomenology of emotions is thus linked with the revelation of value or significance.

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.