Anterior Insular Cortex and Emotional Awareness

By Xiaosi Gu, Patrick R. Hof, Karl J. Friston, Jin Fan. 2013

645 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews the foundation for a role of the human anterior insular cortex (AIC) in emotional awareness, defined as the conscious experience of emotions. We first introduce the neuroanatomical features of AIC and existing findings on emotional awareness. Using empathy, the awareness and understanding of other people's emotional states, as a test case, we then present evidence to demonstrate: 1) AIC and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are commonly coactivated as revealed by a meta‐analysis, 2) AIC is functionally dissociable from ACC, 3) AIC integrates stimulus‐driven and top‐down information, and 4) AIC is necessary for emotional awareness. We propose a model in which AIC serves two major functions: integrating bottom‐up interoceptive signals with top‐down predictions to generate a current awareness state and providing descending predictions to visceral systems that provide a point of reference for autonomic reflexes. We argue that AIC is critical and necessary for emotional awareness. J. Comp. Neurol. 521:3371‐3388, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health, Social Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Psychiatry and Mental health

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. (2015, methodology): “For each trial, an accuracy score was derived: 1 − (|nbeatsreal − nbeatsreported|)/((nbeatsreal + nbeatsreported)/2): Resulting accuracy scores were averaged over the 6 trials, yielding an average value for each participant (Hart et al., 2013).”
Affective Value in the Predictive Mind (2017, result): “So, while we agree with the models by Seth (Seth 2013), Gu, Hof, Friston & Fan (Gu et al. 2013) or by Barrett & Simmons (Barrett and Simmons 2015) that hold that emotions have to do with somatovisceral prediction errors, we stress that those accounts may not sufficiently explain the causes of…”
From cognitivism to autopoiesis: towards a computational framework for the embodied mind (2016, background): “This proposed role for the insula as a core module in the interoceptive hierarchy is a key motif appearing in a variety of related approaches (Barrett and Simmons 2015; Gu et al. 2013; Seth 2013).”
Active interoceptive inference and the emotional brain (2016, background): “If this explanation is right, then it provides a clear pointer to abnormalities of (precision) gain control in cortical systems mediating interoceptive inference such as the anterior insular and cingulate cortex (84, 85).”