Neuroimaging of emotional activation Psychology essay
Central part. The core emotions identified by Ekman in the result of the above experiment are anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness and surprise. Through cross-cultural research, the scientist discovered that these emotions are biological rather than culture-specific and can be conceptualized in relation to the level and degree of activation. Objective: The study of human anxiety disorders has benefited greatly from functional neuroimaging approaches. However, individual studies vary widely in their findings. The authors searched for Abstract. A highly adaptive aspect of human memory is the improvement of explicit, consciously accessible memory for emotional stimuli. Recent findings from neuroimaging, neuropsychological, drug and neural stimulation studies indicate that emotional stimuli engage specific cognitive and neural mechanisms that have a reinforcing effect. One of the most intriguing debates in music psychology research is whether the emotions people report when listening to music are "real." . A 2001 study found that pleasant music activated the dorsal amygdala, which connects to the 'positive emotion' network made up of the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex. Neuroimaging is an important new tool in the toolbox of psychological science, but it is most productive when its use is guided by psychological theories and complemented by convergence. Emotional neuroimaging is typically guided by neuropsychological construct validation strategies. Here the constructs are operationally defined by the complementary methods of emotion psychology and neurophysiology. Both construct types are embedded in hierarchically organized lower- and higher-order networks,