Science Current Event No. 3: The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review

Kristen A. Lindquist^a1, Tor D. Wager^a2, Hedy Kober^a3, Eliza Bliss-Moreau^a4 and Lisa Feldman Barrett^a5

^a1 Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital/Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA 02129, and Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.lindqukr@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lindqukr/

^a2 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309. tor.wager@colorado.edu http://www.psych.colorado.edu/~tor/

^a3 Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06519. hedy.kober@yale.eduhttp://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/people/hedy_kober.profile

^a4 California National Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA 95616. eblissmoreau@ucdavis.eduhttp://www.elizablissmoreau.com/EBM/home.html

^a5 Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, and Departments of Radiology and Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital/Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA 02129.l.barrett@neu.edu http://www.affective-science.org/

Abstract

(Purpose) 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. (Procedure) We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain–emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. (Results) Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. (Conclusion) 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.

Keywords

• Discrete emotion; 
• emotion experience; 
• emotion perception; 
• meta-analysis; 
• neuroimaging;
• psychological construction

Kristen A. Lindquist is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative and is affiliated with the Departments of Neurology (Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital) and Psychology (Harvard University). She received her A.B. in 2004 and her Ph.D. in 2010 from Boston College. Her interdisciplinary research uses social cognitive, psychophysiological, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging methods to understand how emotions emerge from the combination of more basic psychological operations.

Tor D. Wager is the director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, with a focus in cognitive neuroscience, from the University of Michigan in 2003. He joined the faculty of Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Psychology in 2004, and was appointed Associate Professor in 2009. In 2010, he joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research focuses on how expectations shape responses to pain and emotional cues in the brain and body. Peer-reviewed publications include work on brain mechanisms of placebo analgesia and the cognitive regulation of emotion and attention.

Hedy Kober is an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Yale University and Director of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and Director of Research at Yale's Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic. She received her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. in Psychology from Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology with a focus on Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Columbia University in 2009. Her research focuses on neural mechanisms of psychological change, regulation of craving, and regulation of emotion more generally.

Eliza Bliss-Moreau is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Davis and the California National Primate Research Center. She received her S.B. in biology and psychology in 2002 and her Ph.D. in psychology in 2008 from Boston College. Her research focuses on the neurobiological and physiological underpinnings of individual differences in affect and emotion. She adopts a translational approach by modeling affective processing in both humans and nonhuman primates.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab) at Northeastern University, with research appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Barrett received her B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1986, and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Waterloo in 1992. Her research focuses on the nature of emotion from both psychological and neuroscience perspectives, and takes inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. In 2007, she received a National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award for her research.

Summary: 

Definition of META-ANALYSIS

: a quantitative statistical analysis of several separate but similar experiments or studies in order to test the pooled data for statistical significance

Emotions are a huge part of our life; sometimes, it's hard to distinguish them, but they're there. Now, the question is "How does our brain create emotions?" Researchers are determined to find the answer. Two hypotheses were proposed: 1) certain emotions come from specific areas of the brain. 2) Emotions can come from a generalized area of the brain that aren't specific. The brain was then analyzed psychologically and location-wise, along with meta-analytic reports that proved either one or both of the hypotheses true.  The results showed that there was little evidence that proved the hypothesis of specific emotions coming from certain brain regions was valid, so the first hypothesis was wrong. However, data proved something different altogether: brain regions that have to do with the psychological, emotional, and non-emotional part of mind become actively linked when an emotional event occurs. 

Questions: What part of the brain controls emotions primarily? Does age affect how sensitive you are to emotion? Does gender affect how much you can distinguish your emotions? 

Source: 
Lindquist, K., Wager, T., Kober, H., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Barrett, L. (2012). The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review. June 2012, 121-143. Retrieved from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8593980

Science Current Event No. 2: Long Live Coffee Drinkers

Highlighted Text- 

Purpose: Yellow
Hypothesis: Blue
Procedure: Green
Results: Gray
Conclusion: Purple

From "Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer"

Your morning cup of coffee may start to taste even better after a major government study found that frequent coffee drinkers have a lower risk of dying from a variety of diseases, compared with people who drink little or no coffee.

The report, published online in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, analyzed the coffee-drinking habits of more than 400,000 men and women ages 50 to 71, making it the largest-ever study of the relationship between coffee consumption and health.

Previous studies have offered conflicting results on the relative benefits or harms associated with regular coffee consumption.While coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant that may temporarily increase heart rate and blood pressure in some people, coffee also contains hundreds of unique compounds and antioxidants that may confer health benefits. Further confusing much of the research into coffee is the fact that many coffee drinkers are also smokers, and it has been difficult to untangle the relative health effects of coffee and cigarettes.

To learn more, researchers from the National Institutes of Health analyzed diet and health information collected from questionnaires filled out by 229,119 men and 173,141 women who were members of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) between 1995 and 1996. The respondents were followed until 2008, by which point 52,000 had died.

As expected, the researchers found that the regular coffee drinkers in the group were also more likely to be smokers. They ate more red meat and fewer fruits and vegetables, exercised less and drank more alcohol – all behaviors associated with poor health.

But once the researchers controlled for those risks, the data showed that the more coffee a person consumed, the less likely he or she was to die from a number of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, infections and even injuries and accidents.

Over all, the risk of dying during the 14-year study period was about 10 percent lower for men and about 15 percent lower for women who drank anywhere from two cups to six or more cups of coffee a day. The association between coffee and lower risk of dying was similar whether the coffee drinker consumed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

Neal D. Freedman, the study’s lead author and an investigator for the National Cancer Institute, cautioned that the findings, based on observational data, show only an association between coffee consumption and lower risk for disease, so it isn’t known whether drinking more coffee will lead to better health. As a result, Dr. Freedman said that people should be conservative in interpreting the data, but that regular coffee drinkers can be reassured.

 “It’s a modest effect,” he said. “But the biggest concern for a long time has been that drinking coffee is a risky thing to do. Our results, and some of those of more recent studies, provide reassurance for coffee drinkers that this isn’t the case. The people who are regularly drinking coffee have a similar risk of death as nondrinkers, and there might be a modest benefit.’’

The researchers also looked at death rates from cancer during the study period and found no link between coffee consumption and cancer risk among women. There was a slightly higher risk of cancer death among men who drank several cups of coffee a day, but Dr. Freedman said the effect was small and may be due to chance. Additional research will analyze associations between coffee drinking and various types of cancer.

Dr. Freedman said the next step is to learn more about the various compounds in coffee and how they may be related to improved health.

“It’s estimated there are 1,000 or more compounds in coffee,’’ said Dr. Freedman. “All of these could affect health in different ways. It might be due to one of the many compounds in coffee, or a number of them working together.”

Science Current Event No. 1: Talking to Yourself Makes You Smarter

Assistant Professor Gary Lupyan

   Have you ever caught one of your friends talking to themselves, and looked at them like they were crazy? Well, it turns out that they're not; in fact, they're helping their brains! Professors Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley created a test to see if talking to oneself is actually helpful.  There were two experiments, broken into two scenarios; experiment one had a group of volunteers find a picture of an object they were told to look for silently, while another group of volunteers were told to find a picture of an object while saying said object's name out loud. 

   

Professors Lupyan and Swingley, when going over the data, discovered that the people who said the object's name out loud found the object faster, compared to ones who looked for the object silently. 

Associate Professor Daniel Swingley

The second experiment had volunteers look for objects like you would when grocery shopping; one group did so silently, and another said the object's name to their selves. Just like the first experiment, data showed that the people who said the name of the object to their self found it quicker. The professors found another interesting fact, too: if a person did not recognize the name of the object they were supposed to find, they couldn't discover it as quick, even if they said the name out loud. 

Now you know; the next time you lose your phone, keys, or anything else, act crazy and start talking to yourself!

Questions for Further Research:

1) Why did the scientists decide to do this project, or what did they see in the real world that inspired them to do this experiment?

2) What part of the brain does this experiment  help?

3) If this project is redone, what variables could be used?

Source:
Condliffe, J. (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://gizmodo.com/5903023/talking-to-yourself-makes-you-smarter

Science Article Annotation and Summary Practice

   So, today we read a science article called "Fighting Fire with Sound". It was a really cool project, where some students from the University of West Georgia were trying to find a different fire extinguishing system for the international space station; in zero-gravity, water may not always work. 

  

Fire on Earth (left)
Fire in Space (right) 

  The students hypothesized that sound waves would work, by lowering the air pressure around a flame, making it go out. A candle and speakers were used to test the experiment, which was held in a zero gravity simulation room. Even though that particular theory wasn't proved, the students

found out that smaller flames could be put out by sound in their lab. Further research and projects could discover better ways to put out fires around computers, where regular fire extinguishers can't be used.

(n.d.). Retrieved from:

 http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/1012-fighting_fire_with_sound.htm

Website Intro

   Hello, people of the world! I'm Alexia, and this is my blog for science. Let me tell you a little about myself. I'm in eighth grade (almost a freshman!), I go to Sonoran science Academy, the Davis Monthan AFB campus (Go Military People!), I get good grades, and I talk a lot. Except for in the mornings, because I really don't like mornings...

   Even though school just started, I'm actual kind of excited for the curriculum. We're supposed to be doing all these projects and experiments. (And my teacher is pretty nice. He hasn't yelled at us...yet) Since my school is really big on science (because it's Sonoran Science Academy), we focus a lot on science fair. That's basically what this blog is for; science fair, and all my physical science-themed studies. Mr. Oguz, our teacher, has been teaching at our school for about 2 years, and he kept some videos and pictures for us to see from the last science fair and class projects. It was cool! There magic tricks, and signs, and some rapping. 

   I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do for science fair yet, but I do know what topics I like. The last two years, I did projects that involved plants and seeds. This year, I think I'm gonna change it up. Maybe something that has to do with people, or just the brain in particular. I know I have high hopes for going to SARSEF though! That's the Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair. Some of my friends got to go last year, with some even going to AZSEF, the Arizona Science and Engineering Fair. Either way, I'm totally ready to take on the challenge of Science Fair and Physical Science. Bring it on, SSA!