Common circuit or paradigm shift? The functional brain in emotional scene perception and emotional imagery

Meta‐analytic and experimental studies investigating the neural basis of emotion often compare functional activation in different emotional induction contexts, assessing evidence for a “core affect” or “salience” network. Meta‐analyses necessarily aggregate effects across diverse paradigms and different samples, which ignore potential neural differences specific to the method of affect induction. Data from repeated measures designs are few, reporting contradictory results with a small N. In the current study, functional brain activity is assessed in a large (N = 61) group of healthy participants during two common emotion inductions—scene perception and narrative imagery—to evaluate cross‐paradigm consistency. Results indicate that limbic and paralimbic regions, together with visual and parietal cortex, are reliably engaged during emotional scene perception. For emotional imagery, in contrast, enhanced functional activity is found in several cerebellar regions, hippocampus, caudate, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, consistent with the conception that imagery is an action disposition. Taken together, the data suggest that a common emotion network is not engaged across paradigms, but that the specific neural regions activated during emotional processing can vary significantly with the context of the emotional induction. To understand the neural basis of emotion, meta‐analyses often aggregate effects across diverse paradigms, which ignore potential differences specific to the context of affect induction. In this study, fMRI was measured in the same participants during emotional scene perception and emotional imagery to evaluate cross‐paradigm consistency. Results indicate that limbic/paralimbic regions are uniquely involved in emotional perception, whereas emotional imagery prompts activation in a different set of regions, including cerebellum and dmPFC. These data suggest that the neural regions activated during emotional processing can vary significantly with the context of emotional induction.