User:BerryERo/Affective neuroscience

(I added the bold in the "other brain structures" section )

Other brain structures

 * Basal ganglia – Basal ganglia are groups of nuclei found on either side of the thalamus. Basal ganglia play an important role in motivation, action selection and reward learning.
 * Orbitofrontal cortex – The orbitofrontal cortex is involved in decision making and helping us understand how emotions have influenced our decision making.
 * Prefrontal cortex – The prefrontal cortex is the front of the brain, behind the forehead and above the eyes. It plays a role in regulating emotion and behavior by anticipating consequences. The prefrontal cortex also plays an important role in delayed gratification by maintaining emotions over time and organizing behavior toward specific goals.
 * The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a portion of the prefrontal cortex that has shown to have a significant influence on emotion regulation . Through studies, the vmPFC has shown high activation when presented with highly emotional stimuli. This suggests that this portion of the brain is essential for high emotional arousal.
 * Ventral striatum – The ventral striatum is a group of structures thought to play a role in emotion and behavior. An area of the ventral striatum known as the nucleus accumbens is involved in the experience of pleasure. It is common for individuals with addictions to exhibit increased activity in this area when they are exposed to the object of their addiction.
 * Insula – This area of the brain plays a significant role in bodily emotions due to its connections to other neural structures that control automatic functions such as heart rate, breathing, and digestion. The insula is also implicated in empathy and awareness of emotion.
 * Cerebellum – It is involved in many regions of the brain. Regarding affective neuroscience, it plays a role in emotion perception and emotion attributions . It also plays a regulatory role in the neural response to rewarding stimuli, such as money, addictive drugs, and orgasm.
 * A "Cerebellar Cognitive Affective Syndrome" has been described resulting in personality change and how the person shows emotions. Cerebellar dysfunction has been shown to decrease positive emotions during lesion studies. Over the course of evolution, the cerebellum may have evolved into a circuit that helps reduce fear in order to enhance survival
 * Lateral prefrontal cortex - Using our emotions, the lateral prefrontal cortex is responsible for helping us reach our goals by suppressing harmful behaviors or selecting productive ones.
 * Primary sensorimotor cortex - The somatosensory cortex is involved in each stage of emotional processing. We use it to collect information that helps us in identifying and creating emotion, and then regulate that emotion once it has started.
 * Temporal cortex - This brain area is important in processing sound, speech, and language use, as well as helping us understand others faces and others emotions based on facial cues. The temporal cortex is responsible for determining the quality and content of our emotional memories.
 * Brainstem - The brainstem is composed of three parts: ascending (sensory information), descending (motor information), and modulatory. The brainstem takes information from our environment (ascending) and creates a bodily response (descending) such as crying. The information from the environment and our body's responses to the information we receive is combined in the modulatory part of the brain stem and we are then able to label an emotion.

Aging in Affective Neuroscience
Aging is an aspect of affective neuroscience that is relatively important to discuss. When people consider the concept of aging, people typically associate a decline in the functioning of all mental processing abilities, however this is not the case for emotion regulation. As a matter of fact, older adults typically have a stronger drive to maintain and improve on their emotional well being. Thus providing them to utilize emotion regulation skills that provide a higher satisfaction in life

Role of the vmPFC in Emotion Regulation of Older Adults
The ventromedial Prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has a significant influence on emotion regulation, especially regarding high emotional arousing stimuli. Compared to other areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the vmPFC loses volume at a much lower rate. Due to this, an older persons emotion regulation abilities are not very heavily impacted by brain changes associated with aging. Additionally, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is an important area of the brain that is used for emotion regulation. The ACC has proven to be a key player in emotion regulation in not just young adults, but also in older adults. In older adults the ACC is important to create connections with from the vmPFC in order to regulate emotions. This connection was the most salient when negative emotions were reappraised. This demonstrates that older adults use the vmPFC to regulate their emotions in a more positive manner. Despite other areas of the brain decreasing in functionality as humans age, the connection between the vmPFC and ACC remains strong to reappraise negative emotions into more positive emotions. This is different from younger adults who rely on a more on other areas of the PFC.

The Neuropsychology behind Older Adults Emotion Regulation Differences
As people age, most cognitive functions decline. This is not the case when it comes to emotion regulation. A study conducted by Carstensen and colleagues (2000) found that as people increase in age so does their ability to regulate their emotions. It is important to note that just because older adults had better emotion regulation skills, does not mean they live more stable daily lives. In fact, they tend to have more unstable negative emotions especially in comparison to the stability of their positive emotions. The major difference observed in how older adults and younger adults regulate their emotions when negative emotional stimuli are present can be explained by numerous theories.

Passive Method of Emotion Regulation
How older adults handle emotionally salient events or stimuli are often vastly different from younger adults, and even middle aged adults. There does not appear to be many differences in ways that younger, middle, and older adults handle social situations, however when a social situation becomes emotionally charged differences emerge. When intense emotions in a social situation were evoked for older adults, they tended to the situation in a more passive manner in comparison to middle aged adults. They also tend to rely more on their previous problem solving skills than both younger and older adults. This is because as people age, there tends to be a shift in preferences to maintain a more positive emotional affect. In fact, there seems to be a decrease in negative emotions felt by older adults once until they reach the age of 60, in which this decrease stops. It is important to note that while the frequency of negative emotion decreases with age, the intensity of the emotions experienced does not change. Additionally, emotional satisfaction is not lower just because they experience less frequent negative emotions.

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory
Carstensen (2003) hypothesized that the reason that older adults tended to have better emotion regulation skills than younger adults is due to the socioemotional selectivity theory. This theory highlights the role of social interactions in the ability to regulate emotions. Social interactions, while are often positive, can sometimes lead to negative emotional arousal. Since older adults have been alive longer, they have more dense social networks. This creates a drastic increase in social interaction that cause positive emotional arousal. On the chance they experience a negative emotional reaction from a social event, they are likely to be able to pair it with something that is more positively emotionally salient. This causes the negative emotion to be less potent, and therefore increase their hedonic perspective on life.