Trends in cognitive sciences
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Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) · Sep 2012
ReviewMapping discrete and dimensional emotions onto the brain: controversies and consensus.
A longstanding controversy in the field of emotion research has concerned whether emotions are better conceptualized in terms of discrete categories, such as fear and anger, or underlying dimensions, such as arousal and valence. In the domain of neuroimaging studies of emotion, the debate has centered on whether neuroimaging findings support characteristic and discriminable neural signatures for basic emotions or whether they favor competing dimensional and psychological construction accounts. This review highlights recent neuroimaging findings in this controversy, assesses what they have contributed to this debate, and offers some preliminary conclusions. Namely, although neuroimaging studies have identified consistent neural correlates associated with basic emotions and other emotion models, they have ruled out simple one-to-one mappings between emotions and brain regions, pointing to the need for more complex, network-based representations of emotion.
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Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) · Sep 2012
ReviewEmotion and decision-making: affect-driven belief systems in anxiety and depression.
Emotion processing and decision-making are integral aspects of daily life. However, our understanding of the interaction between these constructs is limited. ⋯ We discuss how studies of individuals with emotional dysfunctions provide evidence that alterations of decision-making can be viewed in terms of altered probability and value computation. We argue that the probabilistic representation of belief states in the context of partially observable Markov decision processes provides a useful approach to examine alterations in probability and value representation in individuals with anxiety and depression, and outline the broader implications of this approach.