Social signals can serve as potent emotional triggers with powerful impacts on processes from cognition to valence processing. How are social signals dynamically and flexibly associated with positive or negative valence? How do our past social experiences and present social standing shape our motivation to seek or avoid social contact? We discuss a model in which social attributes, social history, social memory, social rank and social isolation can flexibly influence valence assignment to social stimuli, termed here as ‘social valence’. We emphasize how the brain encodes each of these four factors and highlight the neural circuits and mechanisms that play a part in the perception of social attributes, social memory and social rank, as well as how these factors affect valence systems associated with social stimuli. We highlight the impact of social isolation, dissecting the neural and behavioural mechanisms that mediate the effects of acute versus prolonged periods of social isolation. Importantly, we discuss conceptual models that may account for the potential shift in valence of social stimuli from positive to negative as the period of isolation extends in time. Collectively, this Review identifies factors that control the formation and attribution of social valence — integrating diverse areas of research and emphasizing their unique contributions to the categorization of social stimuli as positive or negative. Social valence — the valence assigned to a social agent or social stimulus — is complex to compute. In this Review, Padilla-Coreano et al. explain how social attributes, social history, social memory, social rank and social isolation states are integrated to modulate social valence assignment.

Abstract Successful retrieval of an event includes an initial search phase in which the information is accessed and a subsequent elaboration phase in which an individual expands on event details. Traditionally, functional neuroimaging studies examining episodic memory retrieval either have not made a distinction between these two phases or have focused on the initial search process. The current study used an extended retrieval trial to compare the neural correlates of search and elaboration and to examine the effects of emotion on each phase. Before scanning, participants encoded positive, negative, and neutral images paired with neutral titles. After a 30-min delay, participants engaged in a scanned recognition task in which they viewed the neutral titles and indicated whether the title had been presented with an image during the study phase. Retrieval was divided into an initial memory search and a subsequent 5-sec elaboration phase. The current study identified neural differences between the search and elaboration phases, with search being associated with widespread bilateral activations across the entire cortex and elaboration primarily being associated with increased activity in the medial pFC. The emotionality of the retrieval target was more influential during search relative to elaboration. However, valence influenced when the effect of emotion was greatest, with search engaging many more regions for positive events than negative ones, but elaboration engaging the dorsomedial pFC more for negative events than positive events.

BACKGROUND Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is prevalent in adolescent populations worldwide. Emotion dysregulation is believed to contribute to NSSI, but underlying mechanisms are less known. We combined psychophysiological and neural data with subjective self-report in close temporal proximity to examine the mechanisms underlying emotion processing in adolescents with NSSI relative to control adolescents without a psychiatric diagnosis. METHODS Thirty female adolescents with NSSI and 30 age-matched female control subjects were included in this case-control study. Participants were presented with negative affective pictures during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. In a separate facial electromyography session, the same participants were shown positive and negative affective images and also provided ratings of valence and arousal. RESULTS Participants with NSSI responded to affective images with greater positive (e.g., zygomatic) and greater negative (e.g., corrugator) reactivity. We found no differences in self-reported affect in response to the images. Analyses of the negative picture-viewing functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed a significant positive correlation between anterior insula response and the averaged electromyography magnitude in NSSI, but not in control subjects. CONCLUSIONS Adolescents with NSSI show enhanced emotional reactivity that is associated with anterior insula responding, but no abnormalities in self-reported affect. This discrepancy between self-report and objective measures of emotional reactivity potentially indicates a suppression of the emotional reaction in adolescents with NSSI. Moreover, the current data suggest potential targets for novel therapeutic approaches that can be combined with existing clinical treatment, such as real-time electromyography-based biofeedback focusing on emotional awareness, labeling, and expressing emotional experiences.

degeneracy result in emergent categorization. From a neuroscientific perspective, the embodied cognition theory examines the interaction of sensorimotor, cognitive Embodied cognition represents a diverse group of theories which investigate how cognition is shaped by the bodily state and capacities of the organism. These embodied factors include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world that shape the functional structure of the brain and body of the organism. Embodied Embodied cognition theories have provided rigorous accounts of emotion and the processing of information about emotion. In this respect, experiencing and re-experiencing an emotion involve overlapping mental processes. Research has shown that one re-experiences emotion through the interconnections of the neurons that were active during the original experience. During the re-experience process, a partial multimodal reenactment of the experience is produced. One reason why only parts of the original neural populations are reactivated is that attention is selectively focused on certain aspects of the experience that are most salient and important for the individual. The first theory of embodiment effect on emotions is known as James–Lange theory, after 19th century scientists William James and Carl Lange. They pointed out that physiological arousal to prior events generates a disposition to experience emotions, and so emotions are not just reactions to these events but are also reflections of dispositional body's states Re-experience of emotion is produced in the originally implicated sensory-motor systems as if the individual were there, in the very situation, the very emotional state, or with the very object of thought. For example, the embodiment of anger might involve muscle tension used to strike, the enervation of certain facial muscles to frown, etc. Such simulation is backed by a specialized mirror neuron or a "mirror neuron system", which maps the correspondences between the observed and performed actions. A remaining issue is the lack of consensus about the exact location of the mirror neurons, whether they constitute a system, and whether there actually are mirror neurons. Theories of embodiment propose that the processing of…

theories symbolic interactionist theories dramaturgical theories ritual theories power and status theories stratification theories exchange theories This Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological and neuropsychological changes, variously associated with subjective experiences such as thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity. Research evolution… Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Emotion". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 429049174. Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Theories of Emotion". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658. About Emotions W. B. Cannon (1915). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage: an account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitement. New York: D. Appleton and Company

Epistemic curiosity is an affective state characterized by the desire for knowledge. This review paper suggests an integrative appraisal model of epistemic curiosity, which combines information-gap, emotion and reward-anticipation accounts of curiosity while proposing an appraisal theory-based explanation for why some knowledge gaps elicit curiosity. We discuss evidence for the involvement of brain circuits that support each step of curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Overall, this integrative appraisal model of curiosity suggests that epistemic curiosity i) is an emotion which is triggered by appraised high relevance, valence, novelty and coping potential of knowledge-gaps; ii) confers a reward value to its epistemic object; iii) triggers a reward anticipation process; iv) and motivates a knowledge-seeking behavior (i.e., "wanting knowledge"). Once curiosity is satisfied, future knowledge-seeking expectations are updated according to affective prediction errors (i.e., "liking and learning"). If relevance is appraised as high but coping potential is appraised as low, the knowledge-gap rather creates anxiety and leads to information-avoidance. Future directions as to how this integrative model can be tested and extended are also discussed.

Emotion recognition from physiological signals has immense applications in healthcare and human-computer interaction. We developed an electrodermal activity (EDA)-graph signal processing pipeline that produces highly sensitive features for detecting the affective dimensions (arousal and valence) of emotions. Using the Continuously Annotated Signals of Emotion dataset, we compared our graph-based EDA features (EDA-graph) with traditional time- and frequency-domain EDA features and features derived from other signals (heart rate variability, pulse transit time, electromyography, skin temperature, and respiration) for detecting affective dimensions using machine learning regression models. The EDA-graph features showed superior performance in continuous affective dimension recognition compared to the most accurate state-of-the-art models, achieving RMSE values of 0.801 for arousal and 0.714 for valence. Furthermore, we used a variety of traditional and recently published datasets collected in laboratory and ambulatory settings to perform a comprehensive evaluation of the robust generalization capabilities of our approach across different emotional contexts. The models demonstrated exceptional performance in classifying emotional states across the datasets, achieving 98.2% accuracy in detecting positive, negative, and mixed emotions; 92.75% in discriminating between emotions (relaxed, amused, bored, scared, and neutral); and 86.54% in detecting stress vs. no stress. These results highlight the potential of a graph-based analysis of EDA in emotion recognition systems in different contexts, especially for real-world applications.