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.
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