'Human brains use 3-D to communicate emotions'

Scientists, for the first time, have identified three dimensions that the human brain uses to communicate emotions.
According to a new study, the human report of emotion relies on three distinct systems: one that directs attention to affective states ("I feel"), a second that categorises these states into words ("good", "bad", etc) and a third that relates the intensity of affective responses ("bad", "awful").
Dr Kevin Ochsner, Director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Columbia University and his team set out to study the processes involved in constructing self-reports of emotion, rather than the effects of the self-reports or the emotional states themselves.

They recruited healthy participants who underwent brain scans while completing an experimental task that generated a self-report of emotion. This effort allowed the researchers to examine the neural architecture underlying the emotional reports.
"We find that the seemingly simple ability is supported by three different kinds of brain systems: largely subcortical regions that trigger an initial affective response, parts of medial prefrontal cortex that focus our awareness on the response and help generate possible ways of describing what we are feeling, and a part of the lateral prefrontal cortex that helps pick the best words for the feelings at hand," said Ochsner in an Elsevier statement.

"These findings suggest that self-reports of emotion - while seemingly simple - are supported by a network of brain regions that together take us from an affecting event to the words that make our feelings known to ourselves and others," he added.
"As such, these results have important implications for understanding both the nature of everyday emotional life - and how the ability to understand and talk about our emotions can break down in clinical populations," he said.
The article appears in Biological Psychiatry published by Elsevier.