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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience
  • Cited by 29
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9780511843716
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511843716
Subjects:
Personality Psychology and Individual Differences, Biological Psychology, Psychology
Collection:
Cambridge Handbooks of Psychology
Information

Book description

Neuroscientific research on emotion has developed dramatically over the past decade. The cognitive neuroscience of human emotion, which has emerged as the new and thriving area of 'affective neuroscience', is rapidly rendering existing overviews of the field obsolete. This handbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date and authoritative survey of knowledge and topics investigated in this cutting-edge field. It covers a range of topics, from face and voice perception to pain and music, as well as social behaviors and decision making. The book considers and interrogates multiple research methods, among them brain imaging and physiology measurements, as well as methods used to evaluate behavior and genetics. Editors Jorge Armony and Patrik Vuilleumier have enlisted well-known and active researchers from more than twenty institutions across three continents, bringing geographic as well as methodological breadth to the collection. This timely volume will become a key reference work for researchers and students in the growing field of neuroscience.

Reviews

"This edited volume provides a welcome up-to-date review of current Literature in the neuroscience of emotion.... Twenty eight-chapters authored by established experts provide coverage that is both broad and deep.... Chapters are well organized into sections that help the reader find relevant information quickly.... The focus on human emotion, rather than on nonhuman models of affect, gives the book a necessary focus while still covering plenty of ground. True to the field, the chapters represent findings from a wide range of methodological techniques.... It can also serve as a useful companion to the other valuable handbooks about emotion that are not as neuroscience oriented.... Highly recommended..."
--R. Compton, Haverford College, CHOICE

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • Chapter 19 - RewardLearning
    pp 444-464
  • Contributions of Corticobasal Ganglia Circuits to Reward Value Signals
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter reviews behavioral and neuroimaging data illustrating the impact of threat and other emotional signals on attention and perception. It presents both current models and remaining issues concerning the brain mechanisms subserving these effects. A key issue in the framework described here is that perception can be modulated by multiple sources simultaneously, including not only endogenous, exogenous, or object-based attention but also emotional feedback signals from the amygdala, together with other emotion-processing regions. Amygdala responses and its projections to sensory areas can be regulated by signals from distinct brain areas, producing different biasing effects according to the context. The central amygdala has strong outputs to the sympathetic pathways and locus coeruleus in the brainstem. Just as attention can be influenced by feature- or object-based effects, reflecting the readiness of our perceptual systems to preferentially encode certain aspects of sensory, it is also influenced by emotion-based or value-based representations.
  • Chapter 21 - MoralEmotions
    pp 491-508
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter draws on existing frameworks for understanding emotion regulation to critically review a large and growing body of work in affective and cognitive neuroscience on the cognitive regulation of emotion. It focuses on studies employing neuroimaging, which is one powerful and widely used method to delineate the neural mechanisms underlying the capacity to flexibly alter and refine the experience of emotions in humans. Emotion regulation has a far-reaching impact on multiple aspects of health, disease, and interpersonal functioning and is now recognized as a critical area of study in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. The chapter presents studies that experimentally manipulate the direction of attention by instructing subjects to pay attention to the nonemotional/nonperceptual aspects of an evocative stimulus. Research over the last decade has elucidated the functional neuroanatomy of the regulation of emotions, focusing on cognitive strategies aimed at attention modification and interpretation change.
  • Chapter 22 - SocialStress and Social Approach
    pp 509-532
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Value-based decision making is the process of selecting actions from among several alternatives to maximize future possible rewards and minimize future possible punishers. Underlying this capacity are a number of distinct neural signals, which include: outcome value, chosen value, decision value and action value. This chapter considers each of these signals and evaluates evidence about the contribution of specific neural circuits to these functions. It briefly reviews evidence for the existence of comparison signals that resemble the outcome of such a decision process. The chapter talks about the post-decision value signals, which serve as an input for generating prediction error signals that are then subsequently used to update the value signals needed to compute future choice. Furthermore, it is likely that decisions emerge as a function of the interaction among a number of additional regions such as the amygdala, striatum, and intra-parietal cortex.
  • Chapter 24 - TraitAnxiety, Neuroticism, and the Brain Basis of Vulnerability to Affective Disorder
    pp 553-574
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter provides an overview of neural mechanisms involved in reward learning, concentrating largely on corticobasal ganglia circuits. It explains how neural circuits contribute to computing value signals for both natural and more abstract social rewards and how these value signals contribute to learning. Given its heterogeneity in terms of connectivity and functionality, the basal ganglia and associated projections are a key component of a putative reward circuit and are the focus of the research described in the chapter. The chapter also talks about the human striatum using neuroimaging techniques. Early studies of reward processing in humans paralleled animal studies, suggesting that activity in the striatum correlated with value signals during reward processing. Processing of reward-related information is highly dependent on components of corticobasal ganglia circuits such as the striatum, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and accumbens (ACC), along with modulation by dopaminergic input.
  • Chapter 25 - Mapping Neurogenetic Mechanisms of Individual Differences in Affect
    pp 575-590
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on episodic memory, a form of consciously accessible memory. More specifically, episodic memory refers to memory for a unique event. Episodic memories generally include the content of the event itself, and information on the spatial and temporal context in which the event occurred. The chapter discusses the ways in which emotion interacts with encoding, consolidation, and retrieval processes, focusing on how both the emotional content of an event and the emotional state of the individual can influence memory. Evidence reviewed in the chapter demonstrates that the emotions we experience when an event is occurring can influence the way we encode, consolidate, and retrieve that event. The chapter discusses an example of mood's influence on memory: the mood-congruent recall. It highlights that an emotional memory may be vivid not because lots of different details are remembered, but because a small set of details are remembered very well.
  • Chapter 27 - Development of Affective Circuitry
    pp 611-634
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Moral feelings motivate humans to act on other people's needs or on moral values, even in the absence of negative consequences for not doing so, such as being punished by law enforcement systems. This chapter briefly touches on the evidence that abnormalities in the experience of moral sentiments are important symptoms of specific neuropsychiatric disorders. It reviews evidence on the neuroanatomical basis of moral sentiments and summarizes opposing models of how to explain this evidence. The chapter then addresses the question whether the brain has developed specialized systems for moral motivations (e.g., helping others or society) as opposed to selfish motivations (e.g., seeking monetary rewards). One crude motivational ingredient of complex moral motivations is attachment. Attachment supports pair bonding and mother-offspring bonding in human as well as nonhuman animal species and may be an evolutionary precursor to the motivational states enabling humans to act morally.
  • Chapter 28 - Emotion and Aging
    pp 635-662
  • Linking Neural Mechanisms to Psychological Theory
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Stress is an everyday phenomenon. The effects of stress become manifest on multiple levels, including behavior, subjective experience, cognitive function, and physiology. Recent imaging studies using a stress paradigm for the fMRI environment have shown a specific brain activation pattern under stress, characterized by deactivation in limbic areas. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has become the gold standard for the experimental induction of psychological stress. This chapter focuses on studies that have used the method of intranasal administration, which in recent years has been successfully combined with established behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms to clarify oxytocin's (OXT's) actions in the human brain. Overall, the tremendous growth in this research field offers not only a promising new path for exploring the neuroendocrinology of the social brain but also a translational perspective for developing novel treatment strategies for social disorders.

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