The emerging field of emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. This review takes an evolutionary perspective and characterizes emotion in terms of response tendencies. Emotion regulation is denned and distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation. In the increasingly specialized discipline of psychology, the field of emotion regulation cuts across traditional boundaries and provides common ground. According to a process model of emotion regulation, emotion may be regulated at five points in the emotion generative process: (a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses. The field of emotion regulation promises new insights into age-old questions about how people manage their emotions.

http://www.elaborer.org/cours/A13/lectures/Gross1998.pdf

The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review.

Deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression.

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

/pdf/the-brain-basis-of-emotion-a-meta-analytic-review-32zzrbb78z.pdf

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review

The cingulate gyrus is a major part of the "anatomical limbic system" and, according to classic accounts, is involved in emotion. This view is oversimplified in light of recent clinical and experimental findings that cingulate cortex participates not only in emotion but also in sensory, motor, and cognitive processes. Anterior cingulate cortex, consisting of areas 25 and 24, has been implicated in visceromotor, skeletomotor, and endocrine outflow. These processes include responses to painful stimuli, maternal behavior, vocalization, and attention to action. Since all of these activities have an affective component, it is likely that connections with the amygdala are critical for them. In contrast, posterior cingulate cortex, consisting of areas 29, 30, 23, and 31, contains neurons that monitor eye movements and respond to sensory stimuli. Ablation studies suggest that this region is involved in spatial orientation and memory. It is likely that connections between posterior cingulate and parahippocampal cortices contribute to these processes. We conclude that there is a fundamental dichotomy between the functions of anterior and posterior cingulate cortices. The anterior cortex subserves primarily executive functions related to the emotional control of visceral, skeletal, and endocrine outflow. The posterior cortex subserves evaluative functions such as monitoring sensory events and the organism's own behavior in the service of spatial orientation and memory.

Functional Heterogeneity in Cingulate Cortex: The Anterior Executive and Posterior Evaluative Regions

We review recent developments in neuroeconomics and their implications for economics. The paper consists of six sections. Following the Introduction, the second section enumerates the different research methods that neuroscientists use evaluates their strengths and limitations for analyzing economic phenomena. The third section provides a review of basic findings in neuroscience that we deemed especially relevant to economics, and proposes a two-dimensional dichotomization of neural processes between automatic and controlled processes on the one hand, and cognitive and affective processes on the other. Section four reviews general implications of neuroscience for economics. Research in neuroscience, for example, raises questions about the usefulness of many economic constructs, such as 'time preference' and 'risk preference'. It also suggests that, contrary to the assumption that humans are likely to possess domain-specific intelligence - to be brilliant when it comes to problems that the brain is well evolved for performing and flat-footed for problems that lie outside of the brains existing specialized functions. Section 5 provides more detailed discussions of four specific applications: intertemporal choice, decision making under risk and uncertainty, game theory, and labor-market discrimination. Section 6 concludes by proposing a distinction between two general approaches in applying neuroscience to economics which we term 'incremental' and 'radical'. The former draws on neuroscience findings to refine existing economic models, while the latter poses more basic challenges to the standard economic understanding of human behavior.

Alexander G. Reeves

Papers

The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebml Functions