Bittersweet: The Neuroscience of Ambivalent Affect
| Autor: | Antonio R. Damasio, Anthony G. Vaccaro, Jonas T. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Cerebral Cortex
media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Neural Inhibition Affective neuroscience Ambivalence Affect (psychology) 050105 experimental psychology Interoception Conflict Psychological Affect 03 medical and health sciences Child Development 0302 clinical medicine Feeling Child Preschool Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Child Psychology Social psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery General Psychology Brain Stem media_common |
| Zdroj: | Perspectives on Psychological Science. 15:1187-1199 |
| ISSN: | 1745-6924 1745-6916 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1745691620927708 |
| Popis: | Ambivalent affective states, such as bittersweetness, nostalgia, and longing, which are felt as having both positive and negative aspects, are an important component of human experience but have received little attention. The most influential theoretical frameworks in affective neuroscience focus largely on univalenced states. As a result, it is not known whether ambivalent affect corresponds to a simultaneously positive and negative valenced state or whether it results from a rapid vacillation between positive and negative states. Here we hypothesize that ambivalent affect involves both mechanisms, that is, rapid vacillation and simultaneity of positive and negative affect, albeit at different neurobiological levels. Rapidly vacillating univalent emotions could give rise to an ambivalent feeling, a mechanism that depends on brainstem nuclei that facilitate rapid action programs of emotional behavior while inhibiting opposing behaviors. This reciprocal inhibition prevents organisms from simultaneously implementing responses to conflicting emotions but also allows for rapid switching between emotions triggered by counterfactual thinking and rapid reappraisal of situations. We propose that as these transitions occur and respective interoceptive information reaches the insular cortex, further processing of this “emotional moment” would allow separate emotional events to be experienced as one “mixed” and integrated feeling. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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