Neural representations of emotion are organized around abstract event features.

ABSTRACT: Research on emotion attribution has tended to focus on the perception of overt expressions of at most five or six basic emotions. However, our ability to identify others' emotional states is not limited to perception of these canonical expressions. Instead, we make fine-grained inferences about what others feel based on the situations they encounter, relying on knowledge of the eliciting conditions for different emotions. In the present research, we provide convergent behavioral and neural evidence concerning the representations underlying these concepts. First, we find that patterns of activity in mentalizing regions contain information about subtle emotional distinctions conveyed through verbal descriptions of eliciting situations. Second, we identify a space of abstract situation featur

SUBMITTER: Skerry AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4824044 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature