States of mind: emotions, body feelings, and thoughts share distributed neural networks

Abstract

Scientists have traditionally assumed that different kinds of mental states (e.g., fear, disgust, love, memory, planning, concentration, etc.) correspond to different psychological faculties that have domain-specific correlates in the brain. Yet, growing evidence points to the constructionist hypothesis that mental states emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological processes that map to large-scale distributed brain networks. In this paper, we report a novel study testing a constructionist model of the mind in which participants generated three kinds of mental states (emotions, body feelings, or thoughts) while we measured activity within large-scale distributed brain networks using fMRI. We examined the similarity and differences in the pattern of network activity across these three classes of mental states. Consistent with a constructionist hypothesis, a combination of large-scale distributed networks contributed to emotions, thoughts, and body feelings, although these mental states differed in the relative contribution of those networks. Implications for a constructionist functional architecture of diverse mental states are discussed.

Figure 1

Conjunction for experience phase across body feelings, emotions and thoughts.

Figure 2

Region of interest analyses demonstrating differential involvement of the default network and the salience network across different mental states for the scenario immersion and the experience phase. Graphs represent percent signal change, bars represent standard error. * p < .05

Figure 3

Left and right hemispheres (lateral and medial view) with activation patterns for emotions > body feelings, body feelings > thoughts and emotions > thoughts for the scenario immersion phase. Clusters of vertices are significant at p < .01 corrected for multiple comparisons (Monte Carlo).

Figure 4

Left hemispheres (lateral and medial view) with activation clusters for body feelings> emotions, emotions > body feelings, thoughts > body feelings and thoughts > emotions for the experience phase. Clusters of vertices are significant at p < .01 corrected for multiple comparisons (Monte Carlo)