The embodiment of emotional feelings in the brain

Central to Walter Cannon's challenge to peripheral theories of emotion was that bodily arousal responses are too undifferentiated to account for the wealth of emotional feelings. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, this remains widely accepted and for nearly a century has left the issue of whether visceral afferent signals are essential for emotional experience unresolved. Here we combine functional magnetic resonance imaging and multiorgan physiological recording to dissect experience of two distinct disgust forms and their relationship to peripheral and central physiological activity. We show that experience of core and body–boundary–violation disgust are dissociable in both peripheral autonomic and central neural responses and also that emotional experience specific to anterior insular activity encodes these different underlying patterns of peripheral physiological responses. These findings demonstrate that organ-specific physiological responses differentiate emotional feeling states and support the hypothesis that central representations of organism physiological homeostasis constitute a critical aspect of the neural basis of feelings

Vagal function in health and disease: Studies in Pittsburgh.

The integration of behavioral processes with changes in vagally-controlled heart rate has been the focus of our investigations. A series of studies is reviewed showing that central and peripheral response inhibition is a primary source of transient, vagally-induced cardiac slowing during information processing. Individual differences in such responses are then shown to relate to the amplitude of cardiovascular responses to stressors. Overall, the specificity and sensitivity of vagal responses to higher level cortical function is supported by our research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract