ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2022
The Neural Representations of Emotional Experiences Are More Similar Than Those of Neutral Experiences.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Amygdalar Pattern Similarity to Negative and Neutral Images, Ratings of the Images, and PET-Measured Amyloid and Tau Levels in Older Adults Without Dementia.Affective science · 2026Article
- Effect of emotion on hippocampal-dependent associative binding through the lens of the weather prediction task.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Affective schemas: Acquisition, updating, and inference.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Neural mechanisms underlying decisions to express or suppress emotions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural Patterns Reflect Shared Emotional History.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Text-related functionality and dynamics of visual human pre-frontal activations revealed through neural network convergence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Grandmaternal caregiving is associated with a distinct multi-voxel neural representation of grandchildren in the parental motivation circuit.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Emotional state dynamics impacts temporal memory.Cognition & emotion · 2025Article
- Are multiple types of associative memory differently impacted by emotion?Cognition & emotion · 2025Article
- The influence of emotion on temporal context models.Cognition & emotion · 2025Review
- Prefrontal circuits encode both general danger and specific threat representations.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Dynamic emotional states shape the episodic structure of memory.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Effects of Experiencing CS-US Pairings on Instructed Fear Reversal.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Aversive memory formation in humans involves an amygdala-hippocampus phase code.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Altered amygdalar emotion space in borderline personality disorder normalizes following dialectical behaviour therapy.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Stimuli that evoke the same feelings can nevertheless look different and have different semantic meanings. Although we know much about the neural representation of emotion, the neural underpinnings of emotional similarity are unknown. One possibility is that the same brain regions represent similarity between emotional and neutral stimuli, perhaps with different strengths. Alternatively, emotional similarity could be coded in separate regions, possibly those sensitive to emotional valence and arousal. In behavior, the extent to which people consider similarity along emotional dimensions when they evaluate the overall similarity between stimuli has never been investigated. Although the emotional features of stimuli may dominate explicit ratings of similarity, it is also possible that people neglect emotional dimensions as irrelevant to that judgment. We contrasted these hypotheses in (male and female) healthy controls using two measures of similarity and two picture databases of complex negative and neutral scenes, the second of which provided exquisite control over semantic and visual attributes. The similarity between emotional stimuli was greater than between neutral stimuli in the inferior temporal cortex, the fusiform face area, and the precuneus. Additionally, only the similarity between emotional stimuli was significantly represented in early visual cortex, anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Intriguingly, despite the stronger neural similarity between emotional stimuli, the same participants did not rate them as more similar to each other than neutral stimuli. These results contribute to our understanding of how emotion is represented within a general conceptual workspace and of the overgeneralization bias in anxiety disorders.
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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.