[3] Emotions are thought to be related to activity in brain areas that direct our attention, motivate our behavior, and help us make decisions about our environment.
[6] Their work suggests that emotion is related to a group of structures in the center of the brain called the limbic system.
Because the "go" cue occurs more frequently, it can be used to measure how well a subject suppresses a response under different emotional conditions.
[60] This task is often used in combination with neuroimaging in healthy individuals and patients with affective disorders to identify relevant brain functions associated with emotional regulation.
The task is a common tool to study deficits in emotion regulation in patients with dementia, Parkinson's, and other cognitively degenerative disorders.
Thus, it is possible to discern which object the participant was attending to by subtracting the reaction time to respond to congruent versus incongruent trials.
[80] The best documented research with the dot probe paradigm involves attention to threat related stimuli, such as fearful faces, in individuals with anxiety disorders.
Anxious individuals tend to respond more quickly to congruent trials, which may indicate vigilance to threat and/or failure to detach attention from threatening stimuli.
[87] Typical FPS paradigms involve bursts of noise or abrupt flashes of light transmitted while an individual attends to a set of stimuli.
[90] A common example given to indicate this phenomenon is that one's startle response to a flash of light will be greater when walking in a dangerous neighborhood at night than it would under safer conditions.
Deep, emotional attachment to a subject area allows a deeper understanding of the material and therefore, learning occurs and lasts.
[101] The existence of basic emotions and their defining attributes represents a long lasting and yet unsettled issue in psychology.
[101] The available research suggests that the neurobiological existence of basic emotions is still tenable and heuristically seminal, pending some reformulation.
[101] These approaches hypothesize that emotion categories (including happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust) are biologically basic.
[103][105] Each basic emotion category also shares other universal characteristics: distinct facial behavior, physiology, subjective experience and accompanying thoughts and memories.
[106] Emotions emerge when neural systems underlying different psychological operations interact (not just those involved in valence and arousal), producing distributed patterns of activation across the brain.
[108] People typically associate aging with a decline in the functioning of all mental processing abilities; however, this is not the case for emotion regulation.
Due to this, an older person's emotional regulation abilities are not heavily impacted by brain changes associated with aging.
A study conducted by Carstensen and colleagues (2000) found that as people increase in age so does their ability to regulate their emotions.
Included studies investigated healthy, unmedicated adults and that used subtraction analysis to examine brain areas that were more active during emotional processing than during a neutral (control) condition.
Consistent neural patterns were defined by brain regions showing increased activity for a specific emotion (relative to a neutral control condition), regardless of the method of induction used (for example, visual vs. auditory cue).
This meta-analysis introduced the concept of the basic, irreducible elements of emotional life as dimensions such as approach and avoidance.
[106] Kober reviewed 162 neuroimaging studies published between 1990 and 2005 in order to determine if specific brain regions were activated when experiencing an emotion directly and (indirectly) through the experience of someone else.
Discriminability analyses identified brain regions that were differentially active under contrasting pairs of emotions.
This meta-analysis examined PET or fMRI studies that reported whole brain analyses identifying significant activations for at least one of the five emotions relative to a neutral or control condition.
As predicted by constructionist models, no region demonstrated functional specificity for fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, or anger.
There is some evidence that the amygdala, anterior insula, and orbitofrontal cortex all contribute to "core affect", which are feelings of pleasure or discomfort.
The anterior cingulate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex play a key role in attention, which is closely related to core affect.
According to psychological constructionist theory, emotions are conceptualizations connecting the world and the body, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex facilitates executive attention.
In several studies, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which supports language, was consistently active during emotion perception and experience.