Brain Circuits Map Human Emotions
Brain Circuits Map Human Emotions
https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/news/the-brain-creates-a-structured-map-of-emotions-410566
Publish Date: 2026-03-11 12:17:00
Source Domain: www.technologynetworks.com
It is well established in psychology that humans conceptualize emotions by features known as valence (the degree of pleasantness or unpleasantness) and arousal (the intensity of bodily reactions, such as rapid breathing or a racing heart).
If you think of “pleasantness” as longitude and “bodily reaction” as latitude, you can imagine a “mental map,” with nodes that “chart” knowledge of emotion.
The neural mechanisms giving rise to this configuration, however, have remained unclear.
Now, a new study reveals that hippocampal-prefrontal circuits — neural structures implicated in forming other types of cognitive maps — could support the mental mapping of emotion.
Nature Communications published the research by neuroscientists at Emory University. The results showed how the hippocampus represents emotion concepts in a structured hierarchy of “nodes” of pleasantness and bodily reaction, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex more accurately tracks relationships between these different nodes, or how they are distributed on the mental map.
Pinpointing the neural mechanisms that produce such map-like representations may ultimately help in the treatment for some mental illnesses, says Philip Kragel, senior author of the research and Emory professor of psychology.
“Research has shown that individuals with depression and anxiety represent emotions in a more compressed, less differentiated way,” he explains. “And that people who represent emotion with more granularity and differentiation tend to have better health outcomes.”
The current paper combined human brain imaging data, pattern recognition and simulations using AI neural networks.
“People’s emotional experiences are subjective,” says Yumeng Ma, first author of the paper and an Emory PhD student of psychology. “We’re using technology to understand the mechanisms underlying emotions in an objective,…
