Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON 
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF EMOTIONS 
When Schachter and Singer carried out their groundbreaking experiment in the early 
1960s, the ways in which they could evaluate the physiology that accompanies emo-
tion were relatively limited. However, advances in the measurement of the nervous 
system and other parts of the body have allowed researchers to examine more closely 
the biological responses involved in emotion. As a result, contemporary research on 
emotion points to a revision of earlier views that physiological responses associated 
with emotions are undifferentiated. Instead, evidence is growing that specifi c patterns 
of biological arousal are associated with individual emotions (Franks & Smith, 1999; 
Vaitl, Schienle, & Stark, 2005; Woodson, 2006). 
For instance, researchers have found that specifi c emotions produce activation 
of very different portions of the brain. In one study, participants undergoing positron 
emission tomography (PET) brain scans were asked to recall events, such as deaths 
and funerals, that made them feel sad or events that made them feel happy, such as 
weddings and births. They also looked at photos of faces that appeared to be happy 
or sad. The results of the PET scans were clear: Happiness was related to a decrease 
in activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex, whereas sadness was associated 
with increases in activity in particular portions of the cortex (George et al., 1995; 
Hamann et al., 2002; Prohovnik et al., 2004). 
In addition, the amygdala , in the brain’s temporal lobe, is important in the expe-
rience of emotions for it provides a link between the perception of an emotion-
producing stimulus and the recall of that stimulus later. For example, if we’ve once 
Schachter-Singer theory of emotion
The belief that emotions are deter-
mined jointly by a nonspecifi c kind of 
physiological arousal and its interpre-
tation, based on environmental cues.