Brain and Emotion

Abstract

Progress in understanding the relation between brain profiles and emotions is being slowed by the belief in a collection of basic emotional states, with the names: fear, anger, joy, disgust, and sadness, that do not specify the species or age of the experiencing agent, the origin of the state, or the evidence used to infer it. This article evaluates critically the premise that decontextualized emotional words refer to natural kinds. It also suggests that investigators set aside the currently popular words and search for relations, in humans and animals, between patterns of measures to varied incentives presented in distinctive contexts.

The central extended amygdala in fear and anxiety: Closing the gap between mechanistic and neuroimaging research

“… 1 It has become increasingly common to draw a distinction between ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ (e.g., LeDoux, 2015). Yet lay people, scholars in other areas, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), and even domain experts often use these terms in interchangeable, inconsistent, or overly inclusive ways (Kagan, in press ; Shackman, Tromp, et al, 2016; Watson, Stanton, & Clark, 2017). To avoid misunderstanding, we have adopted the undifferentiated term ‘fear and anxiety’ (for a more detailed discussion of nomenclature, see Fox, Lapate, Davidson, & Shackman, 2018; Shackman & Fox, 2016).…”