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Neuroscientific Perspectives of Emotion
Dr. Jainendra Shukla
jainendra@iiitd.ac.in
B-501, R & D Block
Computer Science and Engineering
Bidirectional Projections:
● Brain Impacts on the body via visceral efferent pathways
● Body impacts on the brain through afferent feedback
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○ For Example: Laughter Yoga
■ Laughter is possible without humor or cognitive thought
● Voluntary contraction of facial muscles contributes to
emotional experience. (Strack et. al, 1988)
● Participants who hold a pencil with their lips, forcing their
face to prevent or inhibit a smile, rate cartoons as less
amusing than participants who hold pencil in their teeth,
mimicking a smile (Levenson et. al, 1990).
Embodied Cognition
● Emotion is often defined as a multicomponent response to a
significant stimulus characterized by brain and bodily arousal
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and a subjective feeling state that elicits a tendency toward
motivated action.
○ Body plays a crucial role
● There may be instances of emotion in which one or more are
not necessary.
○ Significant stimulus (cf. emotions without cause)
○ Subjective feeling state (cf., unconscious emotions)
○ Motivated action (cf., sadness)
Emotion and Asymmetry
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● Higher engagement of the left – relative to the right frontal brain – is
related to positive feelings and higher engagement. (Coan et al., 2003).
● Exception Alert! Anger = Left Brain Bias (Harmon-Jones et. al., 1998)
The Emotional Brain
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The Emotional Brain
Key brain regions in regards to emotion processing:
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1. Prefrontal Cortex (PFC; involved in emotional experience and
its regulation
2. Amygdala (Stimulus salience and motivational significance)
3. Anterior cingulate (Selection of stimuli for further
processing), and
4. Insula (Feelings and consciousness)
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)
● PFC is the most anterior
part and is generally
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considered to play a major
role in higher order
cognitive activity,
judgement, and planning.
● PFC is also associated in
emotional experience,
motivation and its
regulation.
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)
1. Right PFC: emotional vulnerability and affective disturbance
a. Activity in left hemisphere region may provide a neurobiological
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marker of resilience (Begley and Davidson, 2012).
2. Left PFC: the emotion of anger (Harmon-Jones et al., 2010)
a. PFC has a more important role in approach and withdrawal
motivation, rather than positive and negative valence.
The Amygdala
● Amygdala is almond shaped
cluster of nuclei located in
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the anterior medial
temporal lobe.
● A general role in processing
stimulus salience,
motivational significance,
and arousal (Costafreda et.
al., 2008, Vytal & Hamann,
2010)
The Amygdala
● Amygdala has a central role in negative emotions such as fear
and anxiety (Murphy et. al., 2003)
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● Also activated to fear, disgust, sadness, anger, happiness,
humor, sexually explicit images, and social emotions.
(Costafreda et. al, 2008)
● Studies have also examined amygdala activation during the
experience of non-negative emotions, such as sexual arousal
(Hamann et. al., 2004).
Anterior Cingulate
● AC Cortex (ACC) is key site
for visceral regulations that
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helps to resolve which
sensory input is selected for
processing (Lindquist et. al.,
2012).
● Activity is observed during
classical fear conditioning
and instructed fear based
tasks and this activity is (+)
correlated with sympathetic
nervous system activity.
(Etkin et.al., 2011)
Insula
● Plays a key role in the
experimental and expressive
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aspects of the internally
generated emotion.
● The insula’s role has been
found in general awareness
of the bodily sensations,
affective feeling, and
consciousness (Craig, 2009).
Problems in traditional AC
1. Human emotions include not only the emergency emotion
stimulated by intense instantaneous stimuli, but also the
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process emotion stimulated by the accumulation of continued
weak stimuli over a period of time.
2. Emergency emotions are quick and low-precision responses.
The computational complexity of traditional
precision-oriented affective computing is too high to handle
emergency emotions.
3. Human emotions are personalized and the emotions of
different human individuals excited by the same stimulus can
be different.
Specificity of the emotions
● Although basic emotions are characterized by specific facial
expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1975), a single set of facial
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actions can become different emotional expressions in
different contexts (Barrett, 2012): Surprise, Fear and Anger
Fear
● Characterized by eyebrows raised and drawn together, wide
open eyes, tense lowered eyelids and stretched lips. (Ekman
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& Friesen, 1975)
● Associated with activation within frontoparietal brain regions
(Tettamanti et. al, 2012) and a broad pattern of sympathetic
activation (Harrison et. al, 2013).
○ Reduced Heart Rate Variability
● Also, associated with more numerous skin conductance
responses and larger electromyographic corrugator activity
than is anger (Stemmler et al., 2001)
Anger
● Characterized by lowered eyebrows drawn together, tense
lowered eyelids and pressed lips. (Ekman & Friesen, 1975)
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● Left frontal PFC is activated (Harmon-Jones et al., 2010)
○ Literature is contradictory (Wacker et. al, 2008)
● No change in HRV (Rainville et. al., 2011)
● Anger may elicit either an anger-mirroring or a reciprocating
fear response (Harrison et al. 2013)
○ Psychophysiological responses will be different.
Disgust
● Characterized by raised upper lip, wrinkled nose bridge and
raised cheeks. (Ekman & Friesen, 1975)
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● Differential skin conductance responses may depend on
whether the emotion is elicited by core-disgust inducing
stimuli (e.g. Pictures of dirty toilets) or body-boundary
violating stimuli (e.g. mutilation scenes)
○ Unchanged or decreased skin-conductance for core-disgust
inducing stimuli, e.g. dirty toilets (Harrison et. al., 2013)
○ Increased skin-conductance for body-boundary violating stimuli,
e.g. mutilation scenes (Bradley et. al, 2001)
Sadness
● Characterized by raised inner eyebrows, lowered lip corners.
(Ekman & Friesen, 1975)
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● Associated with increased blood flow in ventral regions
(Mayberg et. al., 1999).
● Crying related sadness:
○ Increased Heart rate
○ No change in HRV
○ Increased skin conductance
● Non Crying sadness:
○ Reduction in heart rate
○ Reduced HRV
○ Reduced skin conductance
○ Increased respiration
Happiness
● Characterized by tensed lower eyelids, raised cheeks and
raised lip corners. (Ekman & Friesen, 1975)
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● The intensity of smiling in photographs has been found to
predict longevity (Abel and Kruger, 2010)
○ Individuals with no smiles: ranged from 72.9 years
○ Partial smiles: 75.0 years
○ Duchenne smiles: 79.9 years
● Happiness is associated with activation in medial prefrontal
and temporo parietal cortices (Tettamanti et al., 2012).
● A body of work further highlights the role of the left PFC in
positive affects.
● Happiness is associated with decreased HRV, amusement and
joy are associated with increases (Kreibig, 2010).
Think-Pair-Share
⚫ For our case-study, Advance UX, which emotions can we
expect to be induced and which region of brains can be active
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?
⚫ Which facial expressions can we expect to show?
References
1. Emotion and the prefrontal cortex: An integrative review.
2. Amygdala-Inspired Affective Computing: to Realize Personalized
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Intracranial Emotions with Accurately Observed External Emotions
3. Human Emotion 8.1: Emotion and the Brain I (Affective Neuroscience)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAqKRPhVRkc
4. Coan JA, Allen JJB. Frontal EEG asymmetry and behavioral activation
and inhibition systems. Psychophysiology 40: 106-114
5. Harmon-Jones E, Allen JJB. Anger and frontal brain activity: EEG
asymmetry consistent with approach motivation despite negative
affective valence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
1998;74:1310–1316.
6. Strack et. al., 1988, Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human
smile: a non obtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis.
References
1. Levenson et. al., 1990, Voluntary facial action generates emotion
specific autonomic nervous system activity.
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2. Harmon Jones et. al., 2010, The role of asymmetric frontal cortical
activity in emotion related phenomena: A review and update.
3. Murphy et. al., 2003, Functional neuroanatomy of emotions: A meta
analysis.
4. Costafread et. al., 2008, Predictors of amygdala activation during the
processing of emotional stimuli: A meta anlaysis of 385 PET and fMRI
studies.
