States of mind: Emotions, body feelings, and thoughts share distributed neural networks

Abstract

Scientists have traditionally assumed that different kinds of mental states (e.g., fear, disgust, love, memory, planning, concentration, etc.) correspond to different psychological faculties that have domain-specific correlates in the brain. Yet, growing evidence points to the constructionist hypothesis that mental states emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological processes that map to large-scale distributed brain networks. In this paper, we report a novel study testing a constructionist model of the mind in which participants generated three kinds of mental states (emotions, body feelings, or thoughts) while we measured activity within large-scale distributed brain networks using fMRI. We examined the similarity and differences in the pattern of network activity across these three classes of mental states. Consistent with a constructionist hypothesis, a combination of large-scale distributed networks contributed to emotions, thoughts, and body feelings, although these mental states differed in the relative contribution of those networks. Implications for a constructionist functional architecture of diverse mental states are discussed.

Large-scale brain networks in affective and social neuroscience: towards an integrative functional architecture of the brain

“…A recent fMRI study from our lab found that several of these nodes produced consistent increases in activation during anger and fear experiences that occur when imagining a variety of social threat and physical danger scenarios [5], and show increased network cohesion when watching movies designed to evoke sadness [54]. Moreover, a recent neuroimaging study that directly compared patterns of network activity during emotions, thoughts, and bodily feelings confirmed that nodes within these networks are engaged across these different psychological domains [55]. …”

Concepts in context: Processing mental state concepts with internal or external focus involves different neural systems

“…Initial support for this idea comes from a recent behavioral study that explicitly manipulated a focus on certain aspects of experience when people read unrelated sentences containing mental state concepts (Oosterwijk, Winkielman, Pecher, Zeelenberg, Rotteveel & Fischer, 2012). We found greater processing costs (slower RTs) when consecutive sentences switched between a focus on internal and external aspects as compared to when consecutive sentences shared the same focus.…”

“…Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009; Craig, 2009), we included sentences describing both emotional and non-emotional mental states (as in Oosterwijk et al, 2012). This manipulation allowed us to test whether internal and external focus produces similar patterns of neural activity across emotion and non-emotion sentences (cf.…”

“…This manipulation allowed us to test whether internal and external focus produces similar patterns of neural activity across emotion and non-emotion sentences (cf. Oosterwijk et al, 2012). This is important in the context of debates about the degree of overlap in neural mechanisms underlying cognition and emotion (Pessoa, 2008; Barrett & Satpute, 2013) and the potentially greater role of internal qualities in the representation of emotional content.…”

Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts

“…And finally, using functional neuroimaging, it would be interesting to investigate to what extent spontaneous sex associations produced by our word pairs engage neural systems that support bodily and sensory states (e.g. anterior insula; see Oosterwijk et al, 2012) and/or neural systems that support the generation of affective meaning (e.g. ventromedial prefrontal cortex; see Roy et al, 2012).…”