The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis

374 Pages·2018·93.81 MB·English

by  Ralph Adolphs

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTION

The
Neuroscience
of Emotion
A N EW SYNTH E S I S
Ralph Adolphs and
David J. Anderson
Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press
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press.princeton.edu
Jacket images courtesy of The Noun Project (thenounproject.com).
Human head icon (modified) by Gregor Cresnar.
Dog icon (modified) by Boris Farias.
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-691-17408-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933553
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro and Replica Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
PART I. Foundations
CHAPTER 1. What Don’t We Know about Emotions? 3
Emotions According to Inside Out 4
Toward a Science of Emotion 13
Emotions Are Decoupled Reflexes 18
Questions We Will Not Answer in This Book 23
What Do We Want to Know about Emotions? 25
CHAPTER 2. A Framework for Studying Emotions 29
Warm- Up: Neuroscience Questions about Emotion 30
Toward a Functional Definition of Emotion 39
Proper Functions and Malfunctions 43
Emotions and Consciousness 49
An Experimental Example 52
Summary 57
CHAPTER 3. Building Blocks and Features of Emotions 58
Building Blocks versus Features 62
A Provisional List of Emotion Properties 65
Summary 98
PART II. Neuroscience
CHAPTER 4. The Logic of Neuroscientific Explanations 103
Levels of Biological Organization 105
The Concept of Mechanism in Neuroscience 108
Testing Causal Relationships between Neural Activity and
Behavior 114
Levels of Abstraction 115
vI CONTENTS
Mixing of Terms in Neuroscience Explanations 120
Necessity, Sufficiency, and Normalcy 123
Summary 125
CHAPTER 5. The Neurobiology of Emotion in Animals:
General Considerations 127
Why Do We Need Studies of the Neurobiology of Emotion in
Animals? 131
What Do We Want to Understand about Emotion by Studying
Animals? 140
The Relationship of Emotion States to Motivation, Arousal,
and Drive 143
Psychiatric Drugs, Animal Models, and Emotions 153
Summary 159
CHAPTER 6. The Neuroscience of Emotion in Rodents 161
Emotion, Fear, and the Amygdala 163
Innate Defensive Behaviors and Emotions 179
Distributed versus Localized Emotions in the Brain 188
Anxiety 189
Other Emotion States: Aggression and Anger 193
Positively Valenced Emotion States 195
Summary 196
CHAPTER 7. Emotions in Insects and Other Invertebrates 197
Learned Avoidance Behavior in Drosophila 198
Does Drosophila Have Emotion States? 203
Anxiety in Insects and Other Arthropods 208
Emotion States and Social Behavior in Insects 209
Internal States in Other Invertebrates 210
Summary 214
CHAPTER 8. Tools and Methods in Human Neuroscience 215
Historical Neuroscience Studies of Emotion in Humans 218
fMRI Studies of Emotion: The Method 233
Similarity Analyses 242
fMRI in Animals? 245
Summary 249
CONTENTS vII
CHAPTER 9. The Neuroscience of Emotion in Humans 251
fMRI Studies of Emotion: The Logic and the Challenge 251
Lessons from Two Examples: Music and Faces 253
Attributing Emotions to Others 257
Imaging Emotion Concepts 260
Feeling Emotions 265
Central Emotion States 270
Dissociating Emotion States from Concepts and Experience 273
Summary 278
PART III. Open Questions
CHAPTER 10. Theories of Emotions and Feelings 281
The Structure of Affect 282
Theories of Feelings 286
Philosophy of Emotion 299
Taking Stock 303
Summary 306
CHAPTER 11. Summary and Future Directions 308
The Main Points of This Book 308
Feelings Again 311
Future Experiments 313
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations 327
References 337
Index 347

ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1. MRI scan of a mother kissing her child 14
1.2. Emotions can be inferred from several kinds of data 17
1.3. Functional varieties of disgust 21
1.4. Desiderata for a science of emotion 26
2.1. Orchestration of many components of a fear response by
the amygdala 34
2.2. Bodily maps of people’s beliefs about emotional feelings 36
2.3. Emotions are functional states 41
2.4. A detailed functional architecture for threat processing 54
2.5. Response of a mouse to a looming stimulus 56
3.1. Spatiotemporal extent of an emotion state 59
3.2. The properties of emotion states 66
3.3. A dimensional space for emotions 68
3.4. Drift- diffusion model 74
3.5. Causal models 82
3.6. Dual- process theories of cognition 84
3.7. Emotion regulation as a metacognitive ability 88
3.8. Expression of emotions in animals 91
4.1. Different scales of biological organization in the brain 107
4.2. Methods for investigating the brain at different scales 109
4.3. Correlation versus causation 112
4.4. Levels of abstraction for investigating emotions 117
5.1. Different ways of thinking about emotions and MAD states 145
5.2. Konrad Lorenz’s hydraulic conception of drive 149
5.3. Two alternative explanations for the action of
anxiolytic drugs 155
6.1. Pavlovian fear conditioning 166
6.2. Fear conditioning and amygdala nuclei 170
6.3. Neuronal subpopulations in the central amygdala 173
6.4. Resolution and cellular specificity of methods to
measure amygdala activity in humans versus mice 175
6.5. Distinct brain regions involved in different types of fear 184