SynthesisCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2016
The Brain Basis of Positive and Negative Affect: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis of the Human Neuroimaging Literature.
Synthesis in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 277 papers, 12 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
277 citing papers in PubMed, 12 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A meta-analysis of cognitive flexibility in aging: Perspective from functional network and lateralization.Human brain mapping · 2024Pooled it
- A research agenda for understanding how social inequality is linked to brain structure and function.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- Community-level explicit racial prejudice potentiates whites' neural responses to black faces: A spatial meta-analysis.Social neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- The neural underpinnings of intergroup social cognition: an fMRI meta-analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Neural representation of social concepts: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Brain imaging and behavior · 2021Pooled it
- Disrupted Dorsal Mid-Insula Activation During Interoception Across Psychiatric Disorders.The American journal of psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- A systematic review of studies that used NIRS to measure neural activation during emotion processing in healthy individuals.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- The role of incidental affective states in appetitive risk behavior: A meta-analysis.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2020Pooled it
- Building the bodily self-awareness: Evidence for the convergence between interoceptive and exteroceptive information in a multilevel kernel density analysis study.Human brain mapping · 2020Pooled it
- Concurrent amygdalar and ventromedial prefrontal cortical responses during emotion processing: a meta-analysis of the effects of valence of emotion and passive exposure versus active regulation.Brain structure & function · 2020Pooled it
- The impact of affective information on working memory: A pair of meta-analytic reviews of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence.Psychological bulletin · 2019Pooled it
- Incorporating the social context into neurocognitive models of adolescent decision-making: A neuroimaging meta-analysis.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Pooled it
- Positive affect disrupts neurodegeneration effects on cognitive training plasticity in older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Changes in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Mediate Effects of Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback on Positive Emotional Memory Biases.Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback · 2023Trial
- Attentional bias modification is associated with fMRI response toward negative stimuli in individuals with residual depression: a randomized controlled trialJournal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2020Trial
- Complementary and opponent value signals in the human brain support choosing the best and avoiding the worst.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neural systems supporting cognitive reappraisal in young children: An fMRI study.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- The functional neurobiology of dispositions towards negative emotions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Transcranial photobiomodulation therapy with 808 nm and 1064 nm can affect different behavior parameters in dogs.Lasers in medical science · 2026Article
- The priming effect of interoception on savoring positive emotion: An EEG study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
217 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to experience pleasant or unpleasant feelings or to represent objects as "positive" or "negative" is known as representing hedonic "valence." Although scientists overwhelmingly agree that valence is a basic psychological phenomenon, debate continues about how to best conceptualize it scientifically. We used a meta-analysis of 397 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography studies (containing 914 experimental contrasts and 6827 participants) to test 3 competing hypotheses about the brain basis of valence: the bipolarity hypothesis that positive and negative affect are supported by a brain system that monotonically increases and/or decreases along the valence dimension, the bivalent hypothesis that positive and negative affect are supported by independent brain systems, and the affective workspace hypothesis that positive and negative affect are supported by a flexible set of valence-general regions. We found little evidence for the bipolar or bivalent hypotheses. Findings instead supported the hypothesis that, at the level of brain activity measurable by fMRI, valence is flexibly implemented across instances by a set of valence-general limbic and paralimbic brain regions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.