{"id":222414,"date":"2026-03-11T12:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T16:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/brain-circuits-map-human-emotions\/"},"modified":"2026-03-11T12:50:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T16:50:16","slug":"brain-circuits-map-human-emotions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/brain-circuits-map-human-emotions\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain Circuits Map Human Emotions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologynetworks.com\/tn\/news\/the-brain-creates-a-structured-map-of-emotions-410566\">Brain Circuits Map Human Emotions<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologynetworks.com\/tn\/news\/the-brain-creates-a-structured-map-of-emotions-410566\">https:\/\/www.technologynetworks.com\/tn\/news\/the-brain-creates-a-structured-map-of-emotions-410566<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-11 12:17:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.technologynetworks.com\">www.technologynetworks.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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).<\/p>\n<p>If you think of \u201cpleasantness\u201d as longitude and \u201cbodily reaction\u201d as latitude, you can imagine a \u201cmental map,\u201d with nodes that \u201cchart\u201d knowledge of emotion.<\/p>\n<p>The neural mechanisms giving rise to this configuration, however, have remained unclear.<\/p>\n<p>Now, a new study reveals that hippocampal-prefrontal circuits \u2014 neural structures implicated in forming other types of cognitive maps \u2014 could support the mental mapping of emotion.<\/p>\n<p>Nature Communications published the research by neuroscientists at Emory University. The results showed how the hippocampus represents emotion concepts in a structured hierarchy of \u201cnodes\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cResearch has shown that individuals with depression and anxiety represent emotions in a more compressed, less differentiated way,\u201d he explains. \u201cAnd that people who represent emotion with more granularity and differentiation tend to have better health outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The current paper combined human brain imaging data, pattern recognition and simulations using AI neural networks.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople\u2019s emotional experiences are subjective,\u201d says Yumeng Ma, first author of the paper and an Emory PhD student of psychology. \u201cWe\u2019re using technology to understand the mechanisms underlying emotions in an objective,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologynetworks.com\/tn\/news\/the-brain-creates-a-structured-map-of-emotions-410566\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":222415,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/assets.technologynetworks.com\/production\/dynamic\/images\/content\/410566\/eggss-640x360.jpg?cb=20260311","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[101],"class_list":["post-222414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222414"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222416,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222414\/revisions\/222416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}