Neural Representation of Fear Experience Is Shaped by Context

Fear is a common emotional experience, crucial for survival. It is typically triggered by perceived danger against physical harm and is associated with self-preservation behavior, but it can also arise in response to more complex social situations, such as public speaking or confrontation, which may threaten to cause psychological rather than physical harm. The nature of fear and other emotions has been debated for centuries. A key unresolved question in affective neuroscience is whether neural encoding of emotion is uniform or heterogeneous across individuals and experiences. This distinction is a core difference between emotion theories (Lindquist et al., 2013). Traditional emotion theories propose that basic emotions like fear are universal, inherited, and supported by dedicated neural circuits (Vytal and Hamann, 2010). For example, fear is typically associated with activity in the amygdala, while other basic emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, and surprise, are linked to other brain structures (Vytal and Hamann, 2010). In contrast, constructionist theories of emotion (Barrett, 2006) posit that emotions are not biologically hard-wired but instead arise from predictions about upcoming events based on a combination of external and internal stimuli and shaped by memories of past events (Barrett, 2017). According to this view, the neural basis of emotional states is idiosyncratic and influenced by both personal and situational factors and thus exhibits degeneracy (i.e., different sets of neurons can underlie the processing of emotional events within the same emotion category; Barrett, 2006). Previous fMRI research has used multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to identify specific brain activity patterns (neural signatures) associated with different emotional states. Some studies concluded that different basic emotion categories have discrete neural signatures, because activity patterns recorded in one set of people could be used successfully to classify emotion categories in others (Saarimäki et al., 2016). However, some argue that … Correspondence should be addressed to Doğa Gündem at doga.gundem{at}kuleuven.be.