experimental contrasts

Piecing together the puzzle of emotional consciousness

Conscious emotional experiences are very rich in their nature, and can encompass anything ranging from the most intense panic when facing immediate threat, to the overwhelming love felt when meeting your newborn. It is then no surprise that capturing all aspects of emotional consciousness, such as intensity, valence, and bodily responses, into one theory has become the topic of much debate. Key questions in the field concern how we can actually measure emotions and which type of experiments can help us distill the neural correlates of emotional consciousness. In this talk I will give a brief overview of theories of emotional consciousness and where they disagree, after which I will dive into the evidence proposed to support these theories. Along the way I will discuss to what extent studying emotional consciousness is ‘special’ and will suggest several tools and experimental contrasts we have at our disposal to further our understanding on this intriguing topic.