CONEUR-1169; NO. OF PAGES 6 Please cite this article in press as: Farb NAS, et al.: Emotions: form follows function, Curr Opin Neurobiol (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2013.01.015 Emotions: form follows function Norman AS Farb 1 , Hanah A Chapman 2 and Adam K Anderson 1,3 Emotion research has been divided by debate as to whether emotions are universal in form or cognitively constructed. We review an emerging approach that focuses on function rather than form. Functional affective science suggests that the particular origin of an emotion is relatively unimportant; instead, emotions can be understood in terms of a rapidly deployed set of mechanisms that structure perception, cognition and behavior to facilitate goal fulfillment. Evidence from this approach suggests at least three major functions of emotion: sensory gating, embodying affect, and integrating knowledge toward goal resolution. These functions appear to be universal and automatically activated, yet also moderated by conscious representation and regulatory efforts. Addresses 1 Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Canada 2 Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, USA 3 Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada Corresponding author: Farb, Norman AS (nfarb@research.baycrest.org) Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2013, 23:xx–yy This review comes from a themed issue on Social & emotional neuroscience Edited by Ralph Adolphs and David Anderson 0959-4388/$ – see front matter, # 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2013.01.015 Introduction The study of emotion is divisive because of the two seemingly contradictory positions that emotions are both universal and individually constructed. Proponents of universality argue that emotions arise from low-level biological systems that support action tendencies which are common across mammalian species [1]. This view emphasizes the distinctiveness and adaptive value of these ‘core’ or ‘basic’ emotions [2,3]. By contrast, propo- nents of constructed emotion argue that emotions arise from the interaction of visceral drives and conceptually derived context. This perspective allows for the breadth of human emotional experience at the expense of uni- versality and functional distinctiveness [4  ,5]. Evidence for both positions is mixed: while emotion expressions are similarly categorized across cultures [6], their associated action tendencies often overlap and can only be differ- entiated by inference from social context [7,8]. One resolution to this debate is to focus on the functions of emotions rather than opining about their origins. This functionalist perspective seeks to establish the basic mechanisms by which emotion affects perception, cogni- tion, and behavior. Functionalist research may also inform universalist and constructionist theories of a particular emotion: the more ubiquitous and automatic an emotion processes is, the more it supports a universalist claim, whereas the more variable or culturally specific a response is, the more it supports constructivism [9  ,10]. Such research has already revealed at least three central func- tions of emotion (Figure 1). First, emotions have a sensory gating function, regulating the breadth and focus of attention. Second, emotions have an expressive function, creating observable, embodied representations of internal states. Finally, emotions have a knowledge integration function, distilling complex representations into concrete action tendencies that facilitate goal resolution. While there are doubtless additional emotion functions, the aim of this article is to demonstrate how prioritizing function over form allows affective research to progress without creating divisive theoretical camps. Function 1: sensory gating Emotional arousal appears to alter perception by regulat- ing sensory access to cognitive representation. Generally, arousal increases sensory throughput: in a recent study by Todd et al., participants rated emotionally arousing images as more perceptually vivid, even after controlling for objective stimulus vividness such as image contrast or complexity [11]. These effects were more than subjec- tive: emotion-evoked vividness (EEV) accounted for greater eye fixations to the images and predicted greater recall of stimulus details. Neurally, emotion engaged a common brain network supporting perceptual vividness: EEG analysis revealed that both objective vividness and emotion-evoked vividness contributed to a posterior cor- tical P2 component at around 200 ms, which was localized to the lateral occipital cortex, posterior insula, and amyg- dala using fMRI. As this effect was observed for both positive and negative images, EEV appears to be a gen- eral consequence of emotional arousal. While EEV enhances perceptual processing of eliciting stimuli, it does so at a cost. In particular, emotionally salient targets appear to attract attention at the expense of peripheral information, in both spatial [12] and temporal [13] dimensions. Corroborating this idea, a recent atten- tional blink study demonstrated that emotional arousal led to poorer second target detection at short time inter- vals between targets, but improved detection at longer intervals [14]. Emotional arousal thus appears to have Available online at www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2013, 23:1–6