Scientists Identify Brain Area Responsible for Evaluating Emotions

Researchers using fMRI have studied the brains of 25 volunteers as they evaluated their own emotions. The study identified brain regions that were most active during these evaluations.

Traditionally, emotions are divided into good and bad, as well as pleasant and unpleasant. When we assess how pleasant a specific emotion is, that’s called a hedonic judgment. When we decide whether an emotion is good or bad, that’s an evaluative judgment. It might seem simple—we should strive for good and pleasant emotions. But what happens when the pleasantness of an emotion doesn’t match our sense of its “rightness”?

Take, for example, lust or pride. Are they pleasant? Absolutely. Are they right? Not really. These emotions are usually frowned upon. On the other hand, feelings like guilt and shame are very unpleasant in the moment, but they can be beneficial and are often considered valuable. These examples clearly show that hedonic and evaluative judgments of the same emotion can differ.

At first glance, the idea that we can have feelings about our own feelings (and feelings about those feelings, and so on—there can be many levels) might seem strange. But according to the author of the recent study, this is completely natural.

In a paper published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Ajay Satpute, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, suggests that the anterior prefrontal cortex plays a key role in evaluating our emotions and, ultimately, in regulating them. Satpute says that we are constantly judging our own emotions.

Some emotions can come with an internal contradiction: they may be pleasant but “wrong,” or unpleasant but desirable. While the hedonic component is relatively constant in any situation, the evaluative component can also depend on social factors. For example, it’s considered wrong to feel joy at someone else’s misfortune or to laugh at a funeral. Even if joy and laughter are hedonicly pleasant, in these contexts they are socially condemned.

The study notes that evaluative judgment is crucial for regulating our emotions according to social norms. When you feel that an emotion is “wrong,” this can help you suppress it. For example, if you feel anger, judging that emotion as undesirable can help you calm down and, say, prevent you from lashing out at someone. In this way, Satpute explains, evaluation is a step toward regulation.

In other words, how we evaluate our emotions affects our behavior. “The knowledge people have can actually shape their emotional experience and, of course, what they do with those emotions,” says Kent Lee, a research associate at Northeastern and co-author of the study.

The researchers found that the anterior prefrontal areas of the brain, especially the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and the precuneus, were most active when participants evaluated their emotions as good or bad. This supports previous findings that the prefrontal cortex is important for making judgments, evaluations, preferences, and moral decisions.

This discovery could even have applications in mental health. Satpute says that this new research may, in the distant future, help us understand people who behave against social norms, and even determine whether it’s possible to intentionally engage the brain regions that help us control our emotions.