ARTICLE UPDATE - Emotional consciousness: A neural model of how cognitive appraisal and somatic perception interact to produce qualitative experience

Thagard P, Aubie B.

Consciousness and Cognition, in press

This paper proposes a theory of how conscious emotional experience is produced by the brain as the result of many interacting brain areas coordinated in working memory. These brain areas integrate perceptions of bodily states of an organism with cognitive appraisals of its current situation. Emotions are neural processes that represent the overall cognitive and somatic state of the organism. Conscious experience arises when neural representations achieve high activation as part of working memory. This theory explains numerous phenomena concerning emotional consciousness, including differentiation, integration, intensity, valence, and change.

ARTICLE UPDATE - Emotion and consciousness

Tsuchiya N, Adolphs R.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, in press

Consciousness and emotion feature prominently in our personal lives, yet remain enigmatic. Recent advances prompt further distinctions that should provide more experimental traction: we argue that emotion consists of an emotion state (functional aspects, including emotional response) as well as feelings (the conscious experience of the emotion), and that consciousness consists of level (e.g. coma, vegetative state and wakefulness) and content (what it is we are conscious of). Not only is consciousness important to aspects of emotion but structures that are important for emotion, such as brainstem nuclei and midline cortices, overlap with structures that regulate the level of consciousness. The intersection of consciousness and emotion is ripe for experimental investigation, and we outline possible examples for future studies.