The neurobiological basis of affect is consistent with psychological construction theory and shares a common neural basis across emotional categories

Abstract

Affective experience colours everyday perception and cognition, yet its fundamental and neurobiological basis is poorly understood. The current debate essentially centers around the communalities and specificities across individuals, events, and emotional categories like anger, sadness, and happiness. Using fMRI during the experience of these emotions, we critically compare the two dominant conflicting theories on human affect. Basic emotion theory posits emotions as discrete universal entities generated by dedicated emotion category-specific neural circuits, while psychological construction theory claims emotional events as unique, idiosyncratic, and constructed by psychological primitives like core affect and conceptualization, which underlie each emotional event and operate in a predictive framework. Based on the findings of 8 a priori-defined model-specific prediction tests on the neural response amplitudes and patterns, we conclude that the neurobiological basis of affect is primarily characterized by idiosyncratic mechanisms and a common neural basis shared across emotion categories, consistent with psychological construction theory. The findings provide further insight into the organizational principles of the neural basis of affect and brain function in general. Future studies in clinical populations with affective symptoms may reveal the corresponding underlying neural changes from a psychological construction perspective.

Conceptual structure of emotions.

“…However, looking at a measure of feature distinctiveness for the set of emotion concepts that share membership in one of six basic emotion categories, there were fewer distinct features produced for emotion concepts relative to a similar set of concrete concepts that were members of similarly sized discrete categories. This indicates that representations of emotion concepts might not be as heterogeneous as expected and that although there is increasing evidence that there is no physiological or neurobiological basis for claiming a set of universal, basic emotion terms (Gündem et al, 2022), at least semantically, concepts falling under the umbrella of a category such as anger or sadness may not be particularly distinct.…”

Psychological construction as a theoretical principle for guiding cognitive-behavioral treatments

“…Recently, increasing research from affective neuroscience supports the idea that psychological states we know (emotion, cognition, and behavior) are not natural kinds, but conceptual constructions reflecting how we explain what the internal and external sensations stand for given prior experience (see Gündem et al, 2022 for reviews of the evidence). Perception is the mental states humans have when they understand what the external sensations stand for based on prior experience (Barrett, 2009 ).…”

“…In other words, it is based on an essentialist assumption regarding conscious psychological states. Recent research suggests a different perspective, claiming that psychological categories are not “essential” phenomena, but observer-dependent constructed entities (Barrett, 2009 ; Gündem et al, 2022 ).…”

Digital Media Literacy as a Driver of e-Governance Services in the Third World Countries: Some Empirical Evidence from Ghana

“…The hybrid nature of these media platforms has created many avenues for stakeholders to influence public discourse and get duty-bearers to rescind some unpopular policies. The spider web analysis in Figure 1 gives a further of the highest and lowest values of sentiments categories on the DDEP; The emotion analysis of the tweets by the Ghanaian public identified emotional categories like disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, joy, trust, and anticipation Gündem et al(2022); Nandwani & Verma (2021), on X the introduction of the DDEP. The emotional analysis was performed to identify the specific reactions to the text of the tweets.…”