Customer Reviews

Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion (Series in Affective Science)

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Emotion had been largely ignored in cognitive neuroscience until some year ago (with LeDoux, Damasio, Panksepp leading the way) Now, there are various attempts to restore emotion as a very important and fruitfull line of research. Cognition cannot be understood stripped of emotion. This book is a collection of the many issues in affective neuroscience. There are various papers dealing with its neuronal correlates, its place in the cognitive hierarchy, with value, its conscious expression, among many other things. Emotion is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, and cognitive neuroscience is trying to explain it from many prespectives. This book is the culmination of these attempts. Must-read for anyone interested in emotion and neuroscience.

For those who are interested in the purely cognitive aspect of emotion, almost without any cultural, clinical, pathological or otherwise unrelated aspects. It's a compendium of studies using behavioural, neuropsychological and neuroimaging methodologies, which ventures forth into the deep and mysterious limbic system, the driving system of our mind. I believe this textbook, although written now a decade ago, is better than the newer texts on the subject (as a cognitive science text), since it's the only one I know which cuts all the non-cognitive approaches.

Introduction:
Psychology is no longer a substantial mean by which emotion can be explained thus a new view on emotion based on neuroscience is necessary and substantiated by this book. Interestingly, select parts of famous emotional theories proposed by people such as Freud, Darwin, Pavlov, and Piaget have been found to have some validity; even more surprisingly has been the discovery of a neural basis for social phenomena such as sex differences in emotional processing and subliminal messaging. While there were a few times I felt like I had to stop reading because of information overload or boredom, I cannot think of a better book that describes the research and developments pertaining to the neuroscience of emotion. There probably have been a large amount of breakthroughs since the book was written in 2000, yet I believe this book still offers an intriguing and extensive review of this field.

Recommendation Audience:
This book is recommended for readers who are at least familiar with neuroscience though I recommended this book for readers who understand the fundamentals of neuroscience. The book is a volume of scholarly reviews and thus the complexity of the material and reading level of the chapters are appropriate for such literary works; however, individual chapters are so well written that readers who struggle a little with reading reviews will be pleased that the the authors convey their ideas in an easily understood manner. Unless you are already well versed in this field, reading the book a chapter at a time is recommended since the chapters are compact and contain tons of information.

Summary:
This is a non-spoiler summary of the book since the books contains so much detailed information it cannot be summarized in such a short manner.

The book is an extensive compilation of scholarly reviews on the neuroscience of emotion and related cognitive processes. Each chapter is separate review written by an influential author (or a few) in this field and the book is edited by an emotional researcher and psychiatrist and by a cognitive neuroscientist. The presented themes are defining emotion and its behavioral and/or physiological responses, the neuroanatomical basis of emotion as modeled using the amygdala, the role of consciousness in emotion, and the relevance and diversity of emotion of human neuroscience. Below I will briefly summarize each theme as presented in the same order as in the book.

Emotions, feelings, and moods are explicitly defined as separate states: emotions are a collection of responses to external or internal stimuli, whereas feelings are the conscious experience of emotion, and moods are frequently or even continuously occurring emotions. Emotions are about something and are built by determining the significance of that something, a process known as appraisal. Emotional appraisal occurs using two different routes (reinstatement of previous experience or computation) that are based on categorization (prototype or theory based) governed by reasoning (associative or rule based) and serve behavioral functions (preparedness or flexibility) that enhance the probability of survival. The general consensus for the purpose of emotion is as an adaptive survival tool. Moreover, emotions and their behavioral responses do not require conscious processing. Survival was dependent on speed and so processing of emotionally significant stimuli required fast processing which antecedes conscious processing. In higher order animal (especially humans) cognition plays a role in the behaviors and feelings that emotions produce.

Survival (in some higher animals) depends on social groups and avoiding dangerous situations. Facial expression and processing of other's faces are of particular importance for the first while fear is of particular importance for the later. Fear produces easily measurable physiological responses across animal species such as changes in heart rate, behavioral changes, sweat response, and activation of the amygdala (a well studied brain region) and thus is widely studied as a model for emotional processing. The amygdala plays an important role in conjunction with the hippocampus in encoding long-term emotional memories especially those dealing with fear; fear conditioning induces a long-term potentiation-like plasticity in the amygdala and enhances learning. Pavlovian conditioning cannot take place if either the hippocampus or amygdala are removed. The exact functions of the amygdala are not fully understood but additional functions probably include a role in stimulus-reward associations (determination of emotional significance of stimuli) and social hierarchy (dominance). Interestingly, "amygdala damage in monkeys produces a pronounced loss of affective behavior and a catastrophic breakdown in social interactions, comparable changes in humans...often appear unremarkable."

Much of cognitive neuroscience is focused on the production and purpose of consciousness. If, "Emotions evolved from simple reflexive actions...among the most primitive and general of these responses are movements towards positive, appetitive things and movements away from negative, unpleasant things," then what is the purpose of emotional consciousness since responses to emotionally significant stimuli can be carried out fully without awareness? The role of consciousness was studied using patients with blindsight or using subliminal masking techniques, and these studies do show that emotion is still processed regardless of consciousness. The purpose of awareness of emotions may be to delay behavioral responses where immediate action is not required and thereby allowing for more informed decisions to be made thus increasing the probability of survival. Furthermore, the purpose of awareness may be to facilitate communication of emotions to others using language; "cognitive development...consists of the transformation of knowledge from implicit (procedural, sensorimotor) to explicit conscious thought forms through the use of language...the way language is used to describe emotion modifies what one knows about emotion and how emotion is consciously experience." Theories on how emotional awareness is created include self-perception using visceral feedback that detect physiological changes (i.e. sympathetic afferents), facial feedback, and more modern theories concerning diencephalic theories , left-right social emotional theory, and modular theory. The book focuses on modular theory which divides emotions into 3 dimensions: valence (positive/negative), arousal, and motor activation and approach-avoidance. They postulate that emotional experience may depend on patterns of neural activation of this modular network; possible brain regions associated with awareness are the anterior cingulate cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the paralimbic cortex.

Dispersed throughout the book are numerous examples (physical and mental) of abnormal and normal patterns of emotion. Abnormal brain function and structure from congenital defects, lesioning, or traumatic injury have provided much of what we know about what brain regions are associated with what functions. Studies have provided information that have therapeutic relevance, and in some cases applications, for depression, anxiety disorders (including phobias), and specialized therapy for specific brain damaged regions. The data presented additionally provides insight into general social behaviors such as the neural basis of differences between emotional processing in men and women. "Females are more facially expressive, males are more reactive [to arousal] in the electrodermal system," "woman are more sensitive to emotional cues in themselves and others than men," and these difference are most likely due to disparities in activation of specific brain areas associated with the respective responses.

Opinion of the Book:
Overall this book was extremely informative and considering the amount of the information packed into each chapter this book is relatively short. The tactical use of figures, diagrams, and other pictures was essential to comprehension of the material and keeping that material interesting; additionally, I truly appreciated the fact that the pictures in the book were large enough to clearly see them and extract the full meaning of the information they conveyed. I generally conquer with the order of the chapters. I believe readers will appreciate the organization of each chapter. Methods, the parts that are the hardest to pay attention to, were easily identified and could be skipped without losing too much important information but were there for those interested in the scientific method. Lastly, I liked the fact that many of the key points were either briefly introduced in a short paragraph or listed out explicitly.

Translation of of scientific information to real-world application is important, and the authors and editors made sure they include applicable and relevant material; moreover, the editors did not forget about future directions of research. The book did not get lost in the localization of brain function and was open to a variety of plausible theories. "Studies of the future will likely be geared to address how specific brain areas execute their functions rather than identifying where in the brain these functions are instantiated." I think the most important thing in terms of content presented by this book was that the material was not presented as hard fact, and the book did not forget to mention the limitations of studies. For future data obtained from functional imaging the data should support other testing methods and not alone be presented as concrete evidence.

Where I have issues with the book begin with the repetitiveness of material. Many of the chapters repeated the material of previous chapters in the same amount of detail. At first when getting use to all the technical jargon and anatomical information this is good, but after a few chapters this become mentally taxing. Because each individual chapter was essential its own review, the amount of material in each chapter was more than enough information for one sitting. I found it quite difficult to pay attention and comprehend each chapter thereafter. Lastly, I can understand why the book focused on fear since it is well categorized emotion and the behavioral and physiological response are easily measured; however, I feel like the book should have covered a greater variety of emotions and more complex emotions such as love; it is not like there is a lack of scholarly material on such subjects.