What do our emotions correspond to? Being sad, angry, happy … is it the same for everyone, everywhere? And how do we know if these emotions arise from a physiological effect or are the consequence of what is happening around us? The question of the origin of emotions is an intrigue for neuroscience.
Initially, it is the concept of innate and universal origin of the emotions based on the theories of Charles Darwin, who dominated. But, faced with the observation that emotions are not defined in the same way in all cultures, and that the boundaries between categories (joy, sadness, anger, etc.) are not the same across the world, this perspective has continued to evolve. A hypothesis called “constructionist“emotions have developed in this way over the last decades. According to this theory, our emotions are” concepts “acquired in childhood and that we continue to acquire over the course of our life, according to our experiences and our environment.
But robust data, from brain imaging and clinical practice, are still lacking to confirm this theory. A recent study published in the journal Brain provides some possible answers.
To separate the two currents of thought, Inserm researcher Maxime Bertoux and the team of the “Neuropsychology and imaging of human memory” laboratory focused on 16 patients suffering from a rare neurodegenerative disease, “semantic dementia. These patients do not do not have the capacity to memorize the acquired knowledge about the world and about language.
Difficulty recognizing observed emotions
“Patients have difficulty mobilizing what they have learned throughout life, for example remembering that Paris is the capital of France, illustrate the researchers. They also have an inability to identify everyday objects and remember how they work or what they are used for, or even understand the meaning of words. “
So from there if the emotions are innate and organic, and not linked to societal concepts, these patients should express and recognize them like anyone else.
To find out, they asked patients about their conceptual knowledge of 4 emotions: anger, pride, surprise and embarrassment. For example, when faced with photos and videos, patients had to guess which emotion was represented or even give synonyms for a particular emotion. If these questions were easy to elucidate for healthy patients, people with semantic dementia had more difficulty responding.
This observation allowed the researchers to answer their question: where do emotions come from? According to them, they mainly come from social learning since childhood. To recognize an emotion, we need codes, knowledge. In addition, the perception of emotions is linked to our knowledge of language. Brain images have also made it possible to support their theory over the course of tests carried out on patients with semantic dementia.
Beyond understanding the origin of emotions, this work is also of clinical interest for these many psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, which lead to emotional disturbances.
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