The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review

By Kristen A. Lindquist, Tor D. Wager, Hedy Kober, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2012

2,003 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain–emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c28037eff0c6c262f24d4ea27b151e010fa37ad

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 Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Overlapping activity in anterior insula during interoception and emotional experience (2012, positive): “Second, the AI is engaged by a wide variety of emotion elicitation tasks and types of cues (Kober et al., 2008; Lindquist et al., 2011; Singer et al., 2004; Wager and Feldman Barrett, 2004; Wicker et al., 2003), which supports a role for the AI in the experience of emotion.”
Compound facial expressions of emotion (2014, methodology): “We could have used other terms, such as “component” or “cardinal” emotions, but we prefer basic because this terminology is already prevalent in the literature (10); this is not to mean that these categories are more basic than others, because this is an area of intense debate (11).”
Comment: The Appraising Brain: Towards a Neuro-Cognitive Model of Appraisal Processes in Emotion (2013, positive): “Complementing Moors (2013), who describes appraisal-based Comment: The Appraising Brain: Towards a Neuro-Cognitive Model of Appraisal Processes in Emotion emotion elicitation at the functional and the algorithmic level, we attempt a description at the implementational level, focusing on the neural…”
The neural pathways, development and functions of empathy (2015, background): “In the same vein, despite the current enthusiasm for the idea that the experience of emotion and the perception of emotion in others rely on the same neural substrates, meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies show a striking dissociation between the two [12].”
Neural network of cognitive emotion regulation — An ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis (2013, background): “These areas are involved in emotion processing (Lindquist et al., 2011; Phan et al., 2002;Wager et al., 2003), which is also reflected by our functional characterization.”
Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. (2014, background): “…question, given that partially overlapping prefrontal regions have been shown in prior work to support emotion generation, perception, experience, and regulation (Kober et al. 2008; Fusar-Poli et al. 2009; Ochsner et al. 2009; Vytal and Hamann 2010; Gross and Barrett 2011; Lindquist et al. 2012).”
Feeling like a state: social emotion and identity (2014, background): “Simply put, emotion categories are ‘socially constructed’ and influence the emotions one experiences (Lindquist et al. 2012, 125; Ellsworth 2014).”
IExpressNet: Facial Expression Recognition with Incremental Classes (2020, background): “Many recent methods [3, 38, 52] suggest that though thousands of emotions are recognized, the types of emotions are much more diverse than previously assumed.”
The neuropsychology of consumer behavior and marketing (2018, background): “For a psychological constructionist summary of brain networks consistently activated during specific mental states and emotional methodological manipulations, see Table 3 of Lindquist et al. (2012).”
Resilience in farm animals: biology, management, breeding and implications for animal welfare (2016, background): “Barrett’s viewpoint has been strongly influenced by her team’s own research and a meta-analysis of numerous studies, which failed to find unique neurophysiological signatures for the individually named emotions (Lindquist et al. 2012).”
Which emotions last longest and why: The role of event importance and rumination (2015, result): “This is especially surprising given the abundance of studies aimed at identifying discrete neural correlates for basic emotions, which has led to mixed findings (e.g., Lindquist et al. 2012; Vytal and Hamann 2010).”
Anterior Insular Cortex and Emotional Awareness (2013, neutral): “…that the insular cortex works closely with a network of regions, including the ACC (Critchley, 2004; Critchley et al., 2004; Medford and Critchley, 2010; Fan et al., 2011; Denny et al., 2012; Lindquist et al., 2012), somatosensory cortex (Gu et al., 2013), and amygdala (Etkin and Wager, 2007).”
Shape shifting pain: chronification of back pain shifts brain representation from nociceptive to emotional circuits. (2013, background): “, 2004) that emphasize the importance of the interaction between brain regions in explaining brain function, and with accumulating evidence that distinct emotions cannot be spatially mapped to specific brain regions, and instead they must be emergent properties of interactive networks (Lindquist et ”
An Appraisal-Driven Componential Approach to the Emotional Brain (2018, positive): “Regions in the medial posterior part of the brain and in the medial prefrontal cortex for the conceptualization process; anterior cortical midline structures for the experience of a feeling (see Heinzel, Moerth, & Northoff, 2010; Lindquist et al., 2012).”