In search of specificity: functional MRI in the study of emotional experience

The growing availability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with its property of high spatial resolution has energized the search for specific neural substrates of basic emotions and their feeling components. In the present article, we address the question as to whether recent fMRI studies on primary affective experiences have truly helped to pinpoint emotion-specific areas in the human brain or whether these studies are afflicted with methodological problems which make such inferences difficult. As one approach for improvement, we suggest the combination of fMRI with methods characterized by high temporal resolution, such as electroencephalography (EEG). Simultaneous recoding allows the correlation of temporally specific EEG components (e.g., the late positive potential) with regional blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals during affective experiences. Combined information on the source as well as the exact temporal pattern of a neural affective response will help to improve our understanding of emotion-specific brain activation.