Variety in emotional life: within-category typicality of emotional experiences is associated with neural activity in large-scale brain networks.

ABSTRACT: The tremendous variability within categories of human emotional experience receives little empirical attention. We hypothesized that atypical instances of emotion categories (e.g. pleasant fear of thrill-seeking) would be processed less efficiently than typical instances of emotion categories (e.g. unpleasant fear of violent threat) in large-scale brain networks. During a novel fMRI paradigm, participants immersed themselves in scenarios designed to induce atypical and typical experiences of fear, sadness or happiness (scenario immersion), and then focused on and rated the pleasant or unpleasant feeling that emerged (valence focus) in most trials. As predicted, reliably greater activity in the 'default mode' network (including medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate) was observed

SUBMITTER: Wilson-Mendenhall CD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4994840 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature