title: Grounding emotion in situated conceptualization.
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.
authors.affiliation: Emory University, United States.
authors.forename: Christine D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Wilson-Mendenhall
authors.affiliation: Northeastern University, United States. Electronic address: l.barrett@neu.edu.
authors.forename: Lisa Feldman
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Barrett
authors.affiliation: The Laureate Institute for Brain Research, United States.
authors.forename: W Kyle
authors.initials: WK
authors.lastname: Simmons
authors.affiliation: Emory University, United States. Electronic address: barsalou@emory.edu.
authors.forename: Lawrence W
authors.initials: LW
authors.lastname: Barsalou
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001921:Brain / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D011582:Psychological Theory; D011930:Reaction Time; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D010100:Oxygen