Emotional Experience

Introduction People often carve experience into affective or emotional moments (Barrett, 2006; James, 1884). From queasy sensations in the stomach or the flush of the face to the flash of lightening or smell of vomit, these perceptions are often understood as feeling discrete emotions such as 'humiliation,' 'excitement,' or 'disgust' or perhaps more simply as 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant' affective valence. A job for social and affective neuroscientists is to understand how these emotional and affective experiences are constructed from activity in the have provided an unprecedented ability to measure activity in the entire brain while a person is in the midst of an emotional experience The use of neuroimaging methods is a recent addition for studying emotional experiences. However, integrating biology in the study of human emotion has been of critical interest since the very beginnings of affective science (for a review, see Dalgleish, Dunn, & Mobbs, 2009). In the 1880s, William James suggested that the experience of emotion arises from afferent projections signaling the body state to the brain. This idea was revolutionary. Emotion terms are often used to describe the causes of physiological and behavioral responses (e.g., I'm blushing and covering my face because I'm embarrassed). In contrast, Williams James proposed that emotional experiences do not cause physiological and behavioral responses; rather, emotional experiences are composed from the perceptions of these responses. James challenged his readers to indicate what an emotional experience was composed of upon taking away all of the visceromotor sensations. His answer was that nothing meaningfully related to emotional experience is left. Although James' evidence was a thought experiment, empirical efforts to determine what constitutes an emotion have been a focus of research ever since In this article, we review the neuroscience literature with a focus on neuroimaging studies of human affective and emotional experiences. We begin by describing the landscape of neuroimaging studies to provide the reader with an idea of how neuroimaging studies of affect and emotion are typically conducted. We then describe the main findings pertaining to components of affective and emotional experience and how different experiences may relate to neural activity. In the prototypical neuroimaging study in affective neurosci-ence, participants are presented with dozens of stimuli that elicit affective or emotional responses while undergoing PET or fMRI scanning (e. Groups of stimuli are intended to induce 'negative,' 'positive,' or 'neutral' affect or emotion categories like 'anger' or 'fear,' and participants are …