Awareness of our own emotions

[Posted to Ian Pitchford's Evolutionary Psychology list by Robert Karl Stonjek, Thu, 3 Jun 2004]

Human feelings: why are some more aware than others?

A.D. (Bud) Craig

Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2004, 8:239-241

A recent article reports that human perception of heartbeat timing is mediated by right (non-dominant) anterior insular cortex, and that the activity and the size of this region is directly correlated with individuals' subjective awareness of inner body feelings and emotionality. These results support the somatic-marker hypothesis of consciousness (a modern successor to the James-Lange theory of emotion) and the neuroanatomical concept that human awareness is based on a phylogenetically distinct interoceptive pathway.

Critchley, Dolan and colleagues have intensively pursued the identification of forebrain regions involved in the neural representation of emotion, primarily using functional imaging. Their recent contribution to this endeavor is an elegant study that matches individuals' subjective perception of their heartbeat and psychometric measures of their interoceptive awareness and emotionality with a region of the cerebral cortex that appears to be anatomically unique to humans. Their findings solidly confirm that right anterior insula (rAI) is important for explicit subjective awareness and, significantly, offer a substantive anatomical explanation as to why some individuals are more aware of their feelings than others. Their work sets the stage for intimate structural analyses of the very essence of human feelings.

Read the rest at BioMedNet
http://gateways.bmn.com/magazine/article?pii=S1364661304001032

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