EmotionalActions · Understanding Emotional Actions

Understanding Emotional Actions

Emotions shape our personal lives and society at large. In Europe emotional disorders affect one in five people; it is the most chronic and the second to most disabling health condition. The stakes to better understand our emotional behaviour are high; however there is still a lot to gain. Traditionally, emotions are thought to guide our behaviour either through fast instincts or deliberately selected actions. Current explanations of emotional health and disease frequently focus on one of these single components in isolation (or regard them as exclusive antagonists) and neglect putative interactions. For example, aggressive behaviour, with its enormous societal consequences and costs, is commonly viewed as loss of emotional control that inhibits inapproriate action. However they are also related to strong instinctual drives. These characterizations likely underestimate our emotional behaviour’s complexity and diversity. This project investigated a complementary account: in humans optimal emotional behaviour arises not from instinctual and deliberate action selection systems individually, but from their interaction, mediated in our brain by a likely uniquely human prefrontal control system. Volman et al. (in prep) shows that the instinctual and deliberate action selection systems can indeed be measured independently. Multiple biases driven by emotions or action goals influence the early selection of an action. Already a few 100 ms after an emotional event these biases start influencing the chosen action. The importance of understanding these processes is supported by the neuroimaging studies on Borderline disorder and psychopathy (Bertsch et al., in press; Volman et al., 2016) showing that control of emotional biases during action selection is altered in these disoders. It is striking that both these disorders that are characterised by altered emotional behaviour and reduced emotional impulse control, show reduced communication between the lateral prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (see figure). This network has previously been shown to be crucial for control of emotional actions (Volman et al., 2011). Together these studies provide a framework for future research to improve understanding of affective disorders related to aggression, by studying if emotional or goal-driven biases drive altered emotional behaviour and reduced control.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union