Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 49, Issue 5, April 2011, Pages 1105-1127
Neuropsychologia

Grounding emotion in situated conceptualization

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.12.032Get rights and content

Abstract

According to the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion, the situated conceptualization used to construe a situation determines the emotion experienced. A neuroimaging experiment tested two core hypotheses of this theory: (1) different situated conceptualizations produce different forms of the same emotion in different situations, (2) the composition of a situated conceptualization emerges from shared multimodal circuitry distributed across the brain that produces emotional states generally. To test these hypotheses, the situation in which participants experienced an emotion was manipulated. On each trial, participants immersed themselves in a physical danger or social evaluation situation and then experienced fear or anger. According to Hypothesis 1, the brain activations for the same emotion should differ as a function of the preceding situation (after removing activations that arose while constructing the situation). According to Hypothesis 2, the critical activations should reflect conceptual processing relevant to the emotion in the current situation, drawn from shared multimodal circuitry underlying emotion. The results supported these predictions and demonstrated the compositional process that produces situated conceptualizations dynamically.

Introduction

Until recently, conceptualization has played a relatively peripheral role in theories of emotion (but see Fehr and Russell, 1984, Russell, 1991, Russell and Fehr, 1994). In basic emotion approaches (e.g., Allport, 1924, Ekman, 1972, Izard, 1971, McDougall, 1921/1908; Panksepp, 1998, Tomkins, 1962, Tomkins, 1963), the central hypotheses are that emotions reflect an inborn instinct, and that the mere presence of relevant external conditions triggers evolved brain mechanisms in a stereotyped and obligatory way (e.g., a snake triggers the fear circuit; Ohman et al., 2007, Ohman and Mineka, 2001). In appraisal approaches to emotion (e.g., Arnold, 1960a, Arnold, 1960b, Ellsworth and Scherer, 2003, Frijda, 1986, Lazarus, 1991, Roseman, 1991), the central hypotheses are that emotions arise from a meaning analysis of the situation in terms of goals, needs, or concerns, and that these conceptualizations of external situational conditions elicit basic emotions independent of any further conceptual processing. In both basic emotion approaches, emotions exist independently of human concepts for them. The cognitive system might conceptually represent what an emotion is and what is likely to occur when one is elicited, but these conceptualizations do not play central roles in emotion itself.

Recent theoretical developments, however, give conceptualization a central role in the construction of emotional episodes (Barrett, 2006a, Barrett, 2009a). According to this approach, conceptualizing a situation in a particular way causes it to be experienced as an emotion (where by situation we mean not only an environmental setting and the physical entities and agents it contains, but also the dynamic actions that agents perform, and the events, interoceptive sensations, and mentalizing they experience). As the brain represents successive situations one after another, conceptual interpretation of each situation – sometimes taking the form of an emotion – creates a unified, meaningful representation of subjective experience, cognition, and the body in context, and then controls subsequent experience, cognition, and action.

In this article, we begin by presenting a grounded theory of the conceptual system that underlies our account of how conceptualization produces emotion. The theory's central assumptions are: (1) a concept is grounded in the systems for perception, action, and internal states that process its instances; (2) the situated conceptualization that represents a concept on a specific occasion emerges from a network of concepts to represent the concept coherently in the current situation; (3) situated conceptualizations represent abstract concepts, including emotion concepts; (4) once active, situated conceptualizations produce subsequent actions, internal states, and perceptual construals. After laying this theoretical groundwork, we present the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion in which situated conceptualizations for emotion concepts play the central role in producing emotion. Finally, we present an experiment that tests two key hypotheses of Conceptual Act Theory: (1) different situated conceptualizations represent an emotion concept (e.g., fear) in different situations; and (2) the composition of situated conceptualizations reflects diverse contributions from distributed neural circuitry that produces emotional states dynamically.

In this section, we summarize a theory of concepts developed elsewhere (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, Barsalou, 2003a, Barsalou, 2003b, Barsalou, 2005a, Barsalou, 2005b, Barsalou, 2008a, Barsalou, 2008b, Barsalou, 2008c, Simmons and Barsalou, 2003). Specifically, this theory assumes that concepts are grounded in situations, the body, and the brain's modal systems for perception, action, and internal states1 (e.g., Anderson, 2010, Martin, 2001, Martin, 2007, Damasio, 1989, Meyer and Damasio, 2009). We focus on non-emotion concepts initially to illustrate properties of the human conceptual system. In the subsequent section, we extend these properties to emotion concepts in the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion. Much detail will be omitted from these accounts that can be found in the articles referenced (and especially in Barrett, 2006a, Barrett et al., in preparation).

A concept aggregates information about category instances into some sort of integrated representation (e.g., Barsalou, 2003a, Barsalou, 2005a, Barsalou and Hale, 1993, Murphy, 2002). The concept of car, for example, aggregates diverse information about cars into a loosely organized representation that includes properties (e.g., engine), relations (e.g., drivers operate cars), prototypes (e.g., the typical car is a sedan), rules (e.g., for something to be a car, it must use an engine that drives four wheels to transport a small number of people along a road), and exemplars (e.g., instances of sedans, coupes, station wagons, etc.).2

Concepts develop for aspects of experience that are relevant repeatedly across situations. Because cars are a frequently relevant aspect of experience, a concept develops in memory to represent them. Concepts similarly develop for other diverse aspects of human experience, including objects, agents, and settings in physical situations (e.g., keys, mechanics, garage). Additionally, concepts develop to represent the behavior of objects, agents, and settings (e.g., skidding, driving, bustling). From simpler concepts, more complex concepts emerge for events (e.g., trip). Concepts similarly develop for a wide variety of internal states including interoceptions and mentalizing (e.g., thirst, fatigue, doubt), as well as for the properties and relations that describe instances of concepts (e.g., blue, slow, intense, above, after, cause, intend). Although concepts reflect experience to a considerable extent, they undoubtedly have biological bases that scaffold learning (Barsalou, 1999, Barsalou, 2008a, Carey, 2009, Rips, 2010, Simmons and Barsalou, 2003).

Theory and research strongly suggest that concepts do not have conceptual cores, namely, conceptual content that is necessary and sufficient for membership in the associated category. In a famous philosophical argument, Wittgenstein's (1953) concluded that a conceptual core cannot be found for the category of games (e.g., no property is true of all category members). Since then, researchers have similarly argued that natural categories do not typically have conceptual cores. Instead, loosely distributed similarity relations between category members – taking the form of a family resemblance or radial category – appear to structure most categories (e.g., Lakoff, 1987, Rosch and Mervis, 1975).3 Nevertheless, people often believe mistakenly that categories do have cores, even when clear exceptions exist (e.g., Brooks & Hannah, 2006), perhaps because a word for the category that always takes the same form implies that a stable conceptual core analogously represents its meaning (e.g., Barsalou, 1989, James, 1950/1890). Theories of psychological essentialism similarly note people's (often unjustified) propensity for creating conceptual cores (e.g., Gelman, 2003).

Exemplar theories of categorization further illustrate that loose collections of memories for category members can produce sophisticated classification behavior, demonstrating that abstractions for prototypes and rules are not necessary (e.g., Medin and Schaffer, 1978, Nosofsky, 1984). Neural net systems similarly demonstrate that only loose statistical coherence is necessary for sophisticated categorization (e.g., McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985). To the extent that abstraction does occur for a category, it may only occur partially across small sets of category instances (e.g., Medin and Ross, 1989, Spalding and Ross, 1994); it may primarily reflect the abstraction of non-defining properties and relations that can be used to describe category members in a dynamcial manner (e.g., Barsalou, 2003a, Barsalou, 2005a); it may reflect online abstraction at retrieval, rather than stored abstractions in memory (e.g., Hintzman, 1986).

The absence of conceptual cores will play a central role in our account of emotion concepts. From hereon, our treatment of concepts assumes that they do not have cores but are instead represented by loose collections of situated exemplars, accompanied by the various forms of limited abstraction just noted.

Once concepts become established in memory, they play central roles throughout cognition, supporting perception, categorization, inference, and many other processes (e.g., Barsalou, 2003b, Murphy, 2002). As people experience a situation, they categorize the agents, objects, setting, behaviors, events, properties, relations, bodily states, mental states, and so forth that are present. As some aspect of experience is perceived, it projects onto all concepts in parallel, with concepts competing to categorize the aspect, with the best-fitting concept winning (e.g., McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). Once an entity has been categorized, categorical inferences follow, including inferences about how the entity is likely to behave, how one can best interact with the entity, the likely value to be obtained from interacting with the entity, and so forth. Such inferences result from accessing category knowledge associated with the concept used to categorize the current instance, and then generalizing this knowledge to the instance.

Concepts originate and operate in the context of continuous situated activity (Barsalou, 2003b, Barsalou, 2005b, Barsalou, 2008c, Barsalou et al., 2007, Yeh and Barsalou, 2006). As situated activity unfolds, numerous modalities and systems that process perception, action, and internal states respond continually (e.g., vision, audition, motor planning and execution, interoception, mentalizing, attention, reward, affect, executive processing, language, memory, reasoning). Depending on the concept, a particular profile of modalities and systems is more or less relevant (e.g., Cree and McRae, 2003). For example, the modality of audition is often relevant for musical instruments but not for fruit, whereas the modalities of taste and smell are often relevant for fruit but not for musical instruments (which is not to say that audition is unimportant for representing a crunchy apple or that smell is irrelevant for representing an old wooden guitar). In general, the informational content of a concept can be viewed as a collection of the multimodal information that has been experienced and processed for its instances. Depending on the particular modalities relevant, the resulting profile of activity becomes stored in distributed neural circuitry that processes the concept, thereby creating a multimodal representation of the relevant processing that typically occurs.

Extensive evidence now exists that different kinds of concepts emerge from different multimodal systems in the brain (cf. McClelland, 2010). Depending on the modalities relevant for processing a concept's instances, particular modal areas of the brain store information about the category and can later represent the category in the absence of actual instances. Martin, 2001, Martin, 2007, for example, has shown that different multimodal profiles represent living vs. non-living things. Other research has similarly established the multimodal profiles that represent the self and others (e.g., Northoff et al., 2006, Van Overwalle, 2009; cf. Legrand & Ruby, 2009), people, buildings, and tools (e.g., Simmons, Reddish, Bellgowan, & Martin, 2010), the external world vs. internal states (e.g., Golland, Golland, Bentin, & Malach, 2008), and so forth.

Concepts are rarely represented in a vacuum. When the concept for car becomes active, it is not represented in isolation, floating in space, but is instead represented in a meaningful background situation (e.g., Barsalou, 2003b, Barsalou, 2005b, Barsalou, 2008c, Barsalou et al., 2003). A car, for example, might be represented in a garage, parking lot, or gas station, or on a dirt road or highway. Many empirical studies demonstrate the extensive presence of situational information as people represent and use concepts (e.g., Bar, 2004, Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005, Chaigneau et al., 2009, Wu and Barsalou, 2009; for a review, see Yeh & Barsalou, 2006).

We refer to the representation of a concept in a background situation as a situated conceptualization. Typically, situated conceptualizations include a setting, agents, objects, behaviors, events, and internal states, each represented by relevant concepts. Thus, the representation of a car on a particular occasion exists within a network of background concepts that represent elements of the entire situation. Furthermore, tremendous diversity exists in the particular background concepts that situate a concept on different occasions. Rather than the concept being represented in a rigid manner across situations, it is represented in widely varying sets of background concepts that contextualize it in each situation.

From the perspective of grounded cognition, situated conceptualizations are also responsible for producing the action, internal states, and perceptual construals that underlie goal-related activity in the current situation. Because modalities for action, internal states, and perceptual construals are typically active when a concept is learned, situated conceptualizations generate activity in these systems as they become active on later occasions. On activating the concept for apple, an associated situated conceptualization might activate representations of actions for eating the apple, representations of internal states such as satiation and pleasure, and perceptual construals that distort taste towards the typical taste of an apple (e.g., Goldstone, 1995, Hansen et al., 2006). Not only does apple represent instances of the concept, it also controls interactions with instances and predicts the resultant events.

In Barrett et al. (in preparation), we further proposed a distinction between concepts that have situated conceptualizations as backgrounds vs. concepts that are situated conceptualizations. In general, concrete concepts such as chair refer to part of a situation and are contextualized when surrounding background concepts represent the remainder of a situation in a situated conceptualization (e.g., concepts for living room, sitting, feeling comfortable). Conversely, abstract concepts such as convince typically refer to an entire situation, not just to part of one, such that an entire situated conceptualization represents them. Convince, for example, integrates an agent, other people, an idea, communicative acts, and possible changes in belief, all organized with a variety of relations, such as the relation of one person having an idea, talking with another, conveying the idea to the other, attempting to change a belief, and so forth (Wilson-Mendenhall, Simmons, Martin, & Barsalou, in preparation). In other words, abstract concepts like convince are relational structures that integrate many different concepts in a situated conceptualization.

Finally, we assume that many situated conceptualizations are associated with a given concept, reflecting the variety of situations in which it is experienced (Barsalou, 2003b, Barsalou, 2008c). For convince, different situated conceptualizations represent convincing a friend, parent, policeman, mugger, audience, and so forth. In each situation, the respective conceptualization supports situated interaction in the relevant situation. Rather than the category having a conceptual core, a set of situated exemplars represents it that exhibit family resemblance and radial structure, accompanied by limited abstractions.

In the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion, we propose that emotion concepts are abstract concepts that work in fundamentally the same as way as other kinds of abstract concepts. Like other abstract concepts, emotion concepts aggregate diverse information within an instance, referring to an entire situation, not just to part of one. Like other concepts, emotion concepts support categorization and inference, and also control subsequent action, internal states, and perceptual construals. Like other concepts, emotion concepts do not have conceptual cores but are represented by loose collections of situated conceptualizations. In this section, we first address the role of situated conceptualizations in representing emotion, and then address multimodal contributions to emotion concepts. Finally we address the roles of emotion concepts in producing the conceptual acts that generate emotion. Further detail on this account can be found in Barrett (2006a) and Barrett et al. (in preparation).

A key assumption of our theoretical approach is that emotion concepts, like other abstract concepts (e.g., convince), refer to entire situations, and thereby represent settings, agents, objects, actions, events, interoceptions, and mentalizing. In other words, an emotion concept is a relational structure that integrates multiple parts of an experienced situation.

We further assume that a specific emotion concept contains a large set of situated conceptualizations that produce emotion in many different kinds of situations, with each situated conceptualization producing a different form of the emotion. Consider one possible situated conceptualization associated with fear, where a runner becomes lost on a wooded trail at dusk. In this situated conceptualization, concepts for forest, night, animals, thirst, confusion, and many others become integrated meaningfully to represent fear, including the associated internal experience and potential actions. Consider another possible situated conceptualization associated with fear, where someone is unprepared to give an important presentation at work. In this situated conceptualization, a different set of concepts represents the situation, including presentation, speaking, audience, supervisor, and many others. Again, the integrated representation of diverse concepts into a situated conceptualization constitutes an instance of fear, including associated internal experience and action.

From this perspective, fear cannot be understood independently of an agent conceptualizing his- or herself in a particular situation. This is not a new insight about emotion but one that emerged in the first half of the 20th century, appearing, for example, in the writings of James (1994/1894, p. 206). Fear can look and feel quite differently in different instances. When you fear a flying cockroach, you might grab a magazine and swat it; when you fear disappointing a love one, you might think of other ways to make them feel good about you; when you fear a mysterious noise late at night, you might freeze and listen; when you fear giving a presentation, you might ruminate about audience reactions or over-prepare; when you fear getting a flu shot, you might cringe anticipating the pain; when you fear hurting a friend's feelings, you might tell a white lie. Sometimes you will approach in fear, and sometimes you will avoid. Sometimes your heart rate will go up, and sometimes it will go down. Whatever the situation demands.

The presence of diverse situated conceptualizations for an emotion explains the Emotion Paradox (Barrett, 2006a, Barrett, 2006b, Barrett et al., 2007). If, as basic emotion theorists assume, an emotion like fear is associated with a module that always executes in the same manner to produce the same stereotyped cascade of responses, then why do the neural and bodily states associated with fear show tremendous variability across instances (for reviews of this variability, see Barrett, 2006b, Barrett et al., 2007; for a discussion see Barrett, 2009a)? Situated conceptualizations offer a natural account of this variability: If different situated conceptualizations represent the same emotion category, then differences among them across all the modalities and systems that process settings, actions, and internal states are likely to produce considerable variability in facial actions, heart rate patterns, breathing patterns, and neural activations. Furthermore, because there is not one bodily signature for each emotion, the same body state across different situations can be conceptualized as different emotions, depending on the situated conceptualization active to interpret it (cf. Dunlap, 1932).

Finally, as described earlier for concepts in general, we assume that the situated conceptualizations representing an emotion bear loose similarity relations to one another, as in a family resemblance or radial category. To the extent that abstractions exist for an emotion, they are not core properties but instead represent relevant information within particular situations, or non-defining properties used to describe the emotion across situations. The low consistency of emotion markers – facial actions, heart rate, breathing, skin conductance, action, and neural activity – across reviews and meta-analyses support the lack of core conceptual content for emotions (e.g., Barrett, 2006b, Barrett et al., 2007, Kober et al., 2008, Lindquist et al., in press, Wager et al., 2008), implying that loose collections of exemplars represent emotions instead (Barrett, 2006a, Fehr and Russell, 1984, Russell, 1991, Russell and Fehr, 1994).

So far we have focused on situated conceptualizations stored in memory that represent concepts, including emotion concepts. We further assume, however, that novel situated conceptualizations are composed online, tailored to the current situation (e.g., Hoenig, Sim, Bochev, Herrnberger, & Kiefer, 2008). Again, imagine being unprepared for a presentation at work and experiencing fear. If similar experiences have occurred previously, then a situated conceptualization that represents them might be retrieved to generate inferences about the current situation and guide behavior. If, however, the current situation is not exactly like any of these previous situations, the situated conceptualization retrieved may be adapted somewhat, incorporating important information from the situation, and retrieving further elaborative information from memory to integrate all the active information coherently. As a result, a novel situated conceptualization is composed online, different from other situated conceptualizations stored in memory for fear. In turn, the composed conceptualization becomes stored with fear, augmenting its stored collection of situated conceptualizations.

As this example illustrates, we assume that situated conceptualizations exist in two forms. On the one hand, memories of previous situated conceptualizations represent a concept in memory. On the other hand, new conceptualizations are composed online that combine a stored conceptualization with information about the current situation and other information in memory needed to integrate them. This relation between stored and composed conceptualizations will be central in drawing predictions for the experiment later and for explaining its results.

Like all concepts, emotion concepts originate and operate in the context of continuous situated activity, with situations typically including a physical setting, agents, objects, and actions in the world, interoceptive sensations from the body, and mentalizing related to prospective and retrospective thought. Over the course of situated activity, numerous modalities and systems in the brain and body respond continually to represent the situation, including exteroceptive perception, interoception, core affect (valuation and salience processes that underlie experiences of pleasure/displeasure and arousal), attention, categorization, executive processing, episodic memory, action, language, reasoning, and so forth.

Meta-analyses of emotion research support the hypothesis that multiple modalities and systems are engaged during the experience and perception of emotion (Kober et al., 2008, Lindquist et al., in press, Wager et al., 2008). Furthermore, diverse studies on animals, patients with brain damage, electrical brain stimulation, and brain imaging clearly show that different emotion categories do not correspond consistently and specifically to distinct brain modules (for reviews, see Barrett, 2006b, Barrett, 2009a, Barrett et al., 2007). For example, subcortical circuits involving the periaqueductal gray (PAG) underlie individual behavioral adaptations for freezing, defensive aggression, and withdrawal, respectively (Bandler et al., 2000, Bandler and Shipley, 1994), and an increase in PAG activity is evident in a meta-analytic summary of neuroimaging studies on emotion (Kober et al., 2008). Notably, however, these circuits do not correspond to particular emotion categories in a one-to-one fashion (Barrett, 2009a, Barrett et al., 2007). Even rats display various combinations of freezing, defensive aggression, and withdrawal when faced with a threat assumed to produce a fear state, varying with the situational context (Bouton, 2005, Fanselow, 1994, Iwata and LeDoux, 1988, Reynolds and Berridge, 2002, Vazdarjanova and McGaugh, 1998; cf. Barrett, 2009a).

Rather than there being a unique module in sub-cortical brain areas for an emotion like fear, emotions appear to result from distributed circuitry throughout the brain that implements perception, action, interoception, core affect, attention, executive processing, memory, language, reasoning, and so forth. Indeed previous meta-analyses of brain areas active for emotion across various tasks have consistently found that distributed circuitry referred to as a “neural reference space” or a “neural work space” produces emotion (Barrett, 2009b, Barrett et al., 2007, Lindquist et al., in press). Within this distributed circuitry, diverse brain states for a given emotion arise, each corresponding to a different situated conceptualization. Rather than a discrete module implementing an emotion, distributed circuitry across the emotion reference space produces an infinite number of situation-specific neural assemblies. Furthermore, the assemblies associated with the instance of one emotion category are not functionally specific, given that they can overlap considerably with assemblies for instances of other emotions.

Within the distributed neural circuitry that produces emotion, the particular processing areas critical for a specific emotion concept are typically active across multiple emotions, and also for basic cognitive processes (e.g., Duncan & Barrett, 2007; for a similar view, see Pessoa, 2008). As demonstrated by a recent meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature (with both methodological and statistical advantages over previous meta-analyses; Wager, Lindquist, & Kaplan, 2007), the brain areas active during both the perception and the experience of anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, and fear exhibited substantial overlap (Lindquist et al., submitted for publication). All emotion states except the experience of fear (but including the perception of fear) were associated with significant increases in amygdala activation, consistent with the idea that the amygdala is important for representing anything with motivational relevance, particularly if uncertainty is present. Similarly, most emotions were associated with significant activation in anterior insula, likely because this part of the insula is particularly important for representing affective feelings in awareness (Craig, 2002, Craig, 2009). Dorsomedial prefrontal areas were also active across emotions, because representing self and others is often important (Mitchell, 2009a, Northoff et al., 2006, Van Overwalle, 2009). Similarly, orbitofrontal cortex was active across emotions to represent affect and expected outcomes in a context-sensitive manner (Kringelbach and Rolls, 2004, Schoenbaum and Esber, 2010), as were a host of other areas typically involved in language, executive attention, and social processing (e.g., lateral prefrontal cortex, the temporal poles, and temporo-parietal junction). Of course, we are not claiming that there are no differences in how the brain implements different exemplars for an emotion concept. The brain state for a situated conceptualization of fear can be distinguished from one for anger, or even a different situated conceptualization for fear, given that each situated conceptualization reflects a different pattern across modalities. Instead, the claim is that all emotions draw on shared distributed circuitry throughout the brain, with each situated conceptualization representing a different pattern in neural space.

In general, the distributed circuitry that produces a specific instance of emotion can be viewed as the set of brain areas required for processing the information that is currently relevant. As described earlier for concepts in general, the modalities that become active to represent a concept reflect the relevant information that must be processed (e.g., Cree and McRae, 2003, Martin, 2001, Martin, 2007, Northoff et al., 2006, Van Overwalle, 2009, Simmons et al., 2010, Golland et al., 2008). To the extent that different instances of the same emotion require the processing of different information, they should draw on different brain regions. To the extent that instances of the two different emotions require processing similar information, they should draw on similar brain regions.

Because emotions occur in the context of situated activity, multiple systems in the brain and body represent this activity continually, including systems that underlie perception, action, attention, executive control, core affect, interoception, episodic memory, language, and mentalizing. As these systems respond continually to represent and control situated activity, conceptual acts occur periodically that classify certain patterns of multimodal activity as emotions. Initially, a stored situated conceptualization for an emotion concept classifies a complex distributed pattern of activity as an instance, which is then elaborated with situationally relevant information to compose an online conceptualization. Within milliseconds, via pattern completion mechanisms, the resulting situated conceptualization has the potential to change core affect and other bodily responses associated with the emotion, along with relevant actions and perceptual construals. Most importantly, the situated conceptualization determines the emotion experienced—what we mean by a conceptual act. Because the conceptualization is grounded in modalities for perception, action, and internal states, and because it controls these modalities, emotion emerges from its activation—the conceptualization does not merely describe the emotion symbolically. Importantly, we assume that these conceptual acts are typically not conscious deliberate events, but are often unconscious and relatively automatic, analogous to how perception, action, and cognition often proceed unconsciously (Barrett, 2006a, Barrett et al., in preparation), although they are likely not free from the influences of executive attention (Barrett et al., 2004, Lindquist and Barrett, 2008).4

As a situated conceptualization for an emotion concept is composed online, it produces a variety of responses via pattern completion inferences. Although a person is always in some state of core affect (pleasure or displeasure with some degree of arousal; Barrett, 2006a, Barrett and Bliss-Moreau, 2009, Russell and Barrett, 1999), a situated conceptualization has the capacity to shift core affect towards a state typically experienced during emotion episodes for a particular kind of situation. Along with core affect, the situated conceptualization produces related changes in bodily states, such as muscle tension and visceral activity. Additionally, the situated conceptualization may initiate relevant actions that are typically associated with the emotion in this situation, with core affect and bodily states often motivating and energizing these actions. Finally, the situated conceptualization may produce perceptual construals of the current situation, biasing and distorting perception towards typical experiences associated with the respective type of situation. Importantly, because many situated conceptualizations can represent a particular emotion concept, each is likely to produce different pattern completion inferences across bodily states, action, and perceptual construal, leading to a wide variety of emotional responses.

Again consider situated conceptualizations for fear. If someone experiences becoming lost in the woods at night, a relevant situated conceptualization for fear becomes active. As a result, core affect might shift into feelings of strong negative valence, which initially encourage freezing behavior but that then increase arousal significantly, thereby energizing subsequent actions, such as searching memory and the environment for the correct route. During this evolving process, noises in the forest may be construed perceptually as ominous and threatening. Analogously, as someone stumbles through a work presentation unprepared, a situated conceptualization for fear in this situation becomes active. As a result, core affect might shift info feelings of negative valence, suggesting that a problem has just arisen, and it might increase arousal, thereby energizing the executive system to generate a compensatory strategy. The situated conceptualization may further engage the attentional system to focus on the supervisor, and to inhibit the motor system from performing further actions unless absolutely necessary. At the same time, the supervisor's facial actions may be construed perceptually as conveying intense disappointment. As these examples illustrate, when a situated conceptualization stored with an emotion concept becomes active, it has multiple concrete effects on perception, action, and internal states. It produces the emotion.

We present a neuroimaging experiment that tests the core hypotheses about emotion concepts in the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion. Specifically, the experiment assessed Conceptual Act Theory's hypotheses that different situated conceptualizations represent the same emotion when it is experienced in different situations, and that the composition of a situated conceptualization reflects contributions from diverse sources of information in the distributed neural circuitry that produces emotion.

In an initial training phase, participants became familiar with two situation types. Importantly, these situations were constructed so that a participant could experience either anger or fear within the context created. One situation type was associated with physical danger brought on by one's own carelessness. On becoming lost during a spontaneous run in the woods at dusk, for example, one could fear bodily harm (e.g., starvation or animal predators) or experience anger directed towards oneself (e.g., for running at night or not being familiar with the route). The other situation type was associated with social evaluation in unfair circumstances. For example, on being unprepared for a work presentation because others on the team did not contribute, one could fear critical judgment (e.g., from a supervisor) or experience anger directed towards others (e.g., at co-workers). Table 1 presents additional examples of these two situation types. On two separate days before the critical scans, participants listened to situations of each type and rated each situation for familiarity, imagery, and their ability to “be there” (i.e., immerse oneself in the situation). As participants listened to a situation, they were instructed to immerse themselves in it as deeply as possible. Descriptions of the situations were written from the first person perspective and contained various details designed to induce immersion.5

The training versions of the situations were longer in duration than was optimal for use in a scanner. For this reason, shorter core versions were written that captured the central components of the longer full versions. Table 1 presents examples. During training, participants were told about the relation between the full and core version of each situation, and practiced generating the full version while listening to the core version. This ensured that participants were prepared to imagine the full version of each situation as they listened to the core version later in the scanner.

On critical trials during scanning, participants first listened to one of 30 physical danger or to one of 30 social evaluation core situations mixed randomly together. Following the situation, participants heard the word for one of four concepts, again mixed randomly: anger, fear, observe, or plan. Participants’ task on hearing the concept word was to rate how easily they experienced the concept in the given situation. This method was designed so that participants would first immerse themselves in the situation, and then later conceptualize this situated activity as an instance of anger, fear, observe, or plan. Our primary interest was to examine if, as the theory predicts, different patterns of brain activity occurred when an emotion (fear or anger) was conceptualized in two different types of situations. Again, all situations were developed so that any of the concepts could be experienced in the context of the situation, especially fear and anger. The two non-emotion abstract concepts were included for comparison purposes (observe and plan).6

Each of the four concepts was presented after each of the 30 physical danger situations and after each of the 30 social evaluation situations. To test our hypotheses, it was essential to separate activation during the period when participants processed the concept from the preceding period when participants processed the situation. Because each concept immediately followed a situation after a short non-varying interval, we used a catch trial methodology to separate activations for the situation and concept (Ollinger et al., 2001a, Ollinger et al., 2001b). Thus, the experiment contained eight critical types of events: anger, fear, observe, or plan experienced in physical danger situations and anger, fear, observe, or plan experienced in social evaluation situations.7

The brain activations that occurred as participants processed the concepts, with activations for the preceding situations removed, were submitted to a Situation Type (physical or social) × Concept (anger, fear, observe, plan) group ANOVA. Taking a factorial ANOVA approach here allowed us to address two general issues. First, it allowed us to establish the different brain regions that composed the situated conceptualizations for an emotion. Second, it allowed us to assess similarities and differences in situated conceptualizations for the same emotion across physical danger and social evaluation situations.8

More specifically, taking a factorial ANOVA approach allowed us to establish how three sources of information composed the two situated conceptualizations for a given emotion. First, concept main effects represented contributions from an emotion concept to a situated conceptualization (where concept main effects were brain areas active for a concept consistently across both types of situations; e.g., activations associated with fear). It is essential to note that concept main effects are units of analysis, not theoretical constructs. A concept main effect is not the activation of a core concept for an emotion, but is simply information active for a concept across physical and social situations. Following our earlier discussion, we assume that the content of a concept main effect is the activation of one or more stored situated conceptualizations that are contributing to the composition of an online situated conceptualization. From hereon, when we use “concept main effect,” we simply mean the unit of analysis that captures the brain activations common across both situation types for a concept, nothing more.

Second, situation main effects represented contributions from situation knowledge to a situated conceptualization (where situation main effects were brain areas active for a situation type consistently across all four concepts; e.g., activations associated with physical danger situations). Again, a situation main effect is not a theoretical construct implying core knowledge about a situation, but simply a unit of analysis that establishes common activations across concepts within a situation.

Third, concept × situation interactions represented information in a situated conceptualization that reflected experiencing a particular concept in a specific situation (where interactions were brain areas more active for one or more situation-concept combinations than for others; e.g., activations for fear in physical danger situations). Again, interaction effects are simply units of analysis that capture activations reflecting both the concept and situation.

Establishing these three units of analysis allowed us to assess how information from emotion concepts and situated knowledge compose different situated conceptualizations for the same emotion.

Preliminary hypothesis. We begin with a preliminary hypothesis that motivates our two critical hypotheses: The brain areas active for a situated conceptualization that produces an emotion should reflect the neural systems required for processing relevant information in the situation. If mental states are relevant, regions of medial prefrontal cortex should become active. If interoceptive or evaluative information is relevant, regions of insula and orbitral frontal cortex should become active. If visual or auditory information is relevant, regions of visual and auditory cortex should become active. In general, when two situated conceptualizations require processing similar information, they should recruit similar neural systems; when they require processing different information, they should recruit different neural systems. Two more specific hypotheses follow from the preliminary hypothesis.

Hypothesis 1

Different situated conceptualizations should produce different forms of a given emotion in different situations. Another way of stating this prediction is that constant, relatively unique modules should not produce the same emotion in different situations. Specifically, we predicted that experiencing emotions in physical danger situations – where harm to the body could occur – would recruit brain regions that process the environment (e.g., parahippocampal gyrus), action in the environment (e.g., motor and parietal regions), and bodily states (e.g., insula). Conversely, we predicted that experiencing emotions in social evaluation situations where negative evaluations could occur would recruit brain regions that evaluate social situations (e.g., medial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices) and that represent relevant social information about individuals (e.g., temporal poles).

Hypothesis 2

Our second hypothesis was that that the composition of a situated conceptualization for an emotion would draw on contributions from different sources of information in the distributed neural circuitry that produces emotion in general. Specifically, we predicted that a situated conceptualization would be composed of information stored with the emotion concept (concept main effects), information stored with knowledge about the situation (situation main effects), and information specific to experiencing the emotion concept in the situation (interaction effects). We further predicted that these different compositional elements of situated conceptualizations would generally draw on common neural circuitry distributed throughout the brain that produces all emotions dynamically (following the meta-analyses in Barrett, 2009b, Barrett et al., 2007, Lindquist et al., in press). Specifically, we predicted that fear and anger would draw on areas associated with mentalizing and interoception (e.g., medial prefrontal and orbital frontal cortices, insula). Similarly, if an emotion required action in the world, such as retaliation during social anger or avoidance during physical fear, areas that process action and space would become active (e.g., motor and parietal areas). We similarly predicted that areas relevant to processing the non-affective abstract concepts of observe and plan would draw on brain areas that process relevant information. Specifically, we predicted that observe would draw on perceptual systems that monitor the environment (e.g., visual and auditory cortices), whereas plan would draw on the executive system (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus, lateral prefrontal cortex). We further predicted that plan, even though it is a non-affective concept, would also draw on regions involved in mentalizing, similar to anger and fear, because mentalizing is central for planning intentional actions.

Section snippets

Design and participants

The experiment contained two training sessions and an fMRI scanning session. The first training session occurred 24–48 h before the second training session, followed immediately by the scan. In the scanning session, participants received 240 complete trials that each contained a physical danger situation or a social evaluation situation followed immediately by one of the four concepts. Participants also received 120 catch trials containing only a situation, which enabled separation of the

Results

As described earlier, we used a factorial ANOVA to establish contributions to the situated conceptualizations constructed when the participant experienced a concept (anger, fear, observe, or plan) in the context of situation type (physical danger or social evaluation). Initially, we report activations from the ANOVA for the two main effects and their interaction. We then integrate activations across the main effects and interaction to establish the situated conceptualizations for each concept

Discussion

The results support our preliminary hypothesis that a situated conceptualization draws on neural systems that process relevant information. In the discussion that follows, we review extensive supporting evidence for this hypothesis. The results further support the two critical hypotheses that follow from the preliminary hypothesis. First, as Conceptual Act Theory predicts, different situated conceptualizations represented the same emotion in different situations. Inconsistent with basic emotion

Conclusion

Our results support the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion. Consistent with this theory, different situated conceptualizations represent the same emotion concept in different situations. Furthermore, situated conceptualizations of emotion instantiate common neural circuity distributed across the brain that is not specific to emotion per se. Specific instances of emotion are constructed dynamically within this circuitry to represent an emotion in a particular situation.

Acknowledgement

Work on this chapter was supported by an NIH Director's Pioneer Award DPI OD003312 to Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University with a sub-contract to Lawrence Barsalou at Emory University.

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