Bittersweet: The Neuroscience of Ambivalent Affect

Abstract

Ambivalent affective states, such as bittersweetness, nostalgia, and longing, which are felt as having both positive and negative aspects, are an important component of human experience but have received little attention. The most influential theoretical frameworks in affective neuroscience focus largely on univalenced states. As a result, it is not known whether ambivalent affect corresponds to a simultaneously positive and negative valenced state or whether it results from a rapid vacillation between positive and negative states. Here we hypothesize that ambivalent affect involves both mechanisms, that is, rapid vacillation and simultaneity of positive and negative affect, albeit at different neurobiological levels. Rapidly vacillating univalent emotions could give rise to an ambivalent feeling, a mechanism that depends on brainstem nuclei that facilitate rapid action programs of emotional behavior while inhibiting opposing behaviors. This reciprocal inhibition prevents organisms from simultaneously implementing responses to conflicting emotions but also allows for rapid switching between emotions triggered by counterfactual thinking and rapid reappraisal of situations. We propose that as these transitions occur and respective interoceptive information reaches the insular cortex, further processing of this “emotional moment” would allow separate emotional events to be experienced as one “mixed” and integrated feeling.

Torn Between Valences: Mixed Emotions Predict Poorer Psychological Well-Being and Job Burnout

“…For example, individuals who feel mixed towards a target object tend to evaluate it more negatively (Bee & Madrigal, 2013 ), and mixed emotions may be linked to traits which have negative associations with well-being such as neuroticism (Barford & Smillie, 2016 ), negative emotions (Barford et al, 2020 ), and negative life events (Hui et al, 2009). More recently, neuroscientific conceptualizations of mixed emotions have also argued that conflict is the most defining characteristic of mixed emotions (Vaccaro et al, 2020 ). While none of these studies alone may imply an alternative hypothesis, together they suggest its possibility.…”

‘I feel the irritation and frustration all over the body’ Affective ambiguities in networked parenting culture

“…As Lauren Berlant (2011) argues, people affectively invest in settings that increase their pain and attach them to the very source of their suffering (also Kolehmainen and Juvonen, 2018: 6). We can embrace that which keeps us from thriving, feel visceral resentment toward that which adds to our well-being, or enjoy the bittersweetness of things (Vaccaro et al, 2020). Fans can love media products or intensely engage in enjoyable 'hate-watching' with what they dislike or even despise (Click, 2019).…”

Naturalistic Stimuli in Affective Neuroimaging: A Review

“…Despite their other differences, most current emotion theories agree that emotions are multicomponent phenomena (see e.g., Sander et al, 2018). A consensual, componential view of emotions suggests that they are elicited as a response to personally relevant stimuli and lead to responses in multiple functional components systems (Figure 1A; see e.g., Mauss and Robinson, 2009;Sander et al, 2018;Vaccaro et al, 2020). When relevant emotional input arrives in the brain, several automatic changes take place in split seconds: changes in autonomic nervous system activity including heart rate and respiration, in interoception, in behavior including facial behaviors, voice, bodily behaviors, and actions, in systems controlling behavior, in memories and expectations, and in the interpretation of our current state and that of the environment.…”

“…In this review, I describe such a framework based on a consensual, componential view of emotions (for similar approaches, see Mauss and Robinson, 2009;Sander et al, 2018;Vaccaro et al, 2020) and apply this framework to review how naturalistic stimuli have been employed to investigate emotions. Excellent recent reviews introduce methods for naturalistic paradigms in neuroscience (Nastase et al, 2019;Sonkusare et al, 2019) and summarize results across different domains of human cognition (Jääskeläinen et al, 2021).…”