For example, cognitive neuroscientists have attempted to identify the unified neural basis of fear (e.g., Whalen et al., 1998), disgust (e.g., Wicker et al., 2003), love (e.g., Bartels & Zeki, 2000), the self (e.g., Northoff & Bermpohl, 2004), episodic memory ( Rugg, Otten, & Henson, 2002), semantic memory (e.g., Grossman et al., 2002), working memory (e.g., D’Esposito et al., 1998), face perception (e.g., Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997) and so on.

Accordingly, scientists have searched for the physical correlates of these mental categories for over a century-in behavior, in peripheral physiology, and most recently, in a functioning brain. Since the beginning of psychological science, researchers have assumed that each of these words refers to a separate and distinct kind of mental category or “faculty” ( Lindquist & Barrett, under review Uttal, 2001). These mental states are typically named in commonsense terms, such as emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, love), cognitions (e.g., retrieving a memory, planning the future, concentrating on a task), perceptions (e.g., face perception, color perception, sound perception), and so on. Implications for a constructionist functional architecture of diverse mental states are discussed.ĭuring every waking moment of life, a human mind consists of a variety of mental states. Consistent with a constructionist hypothesis, a combination of large-scale distributed networks contributed to emotions, thoughts, and body feelings, although these mental states differed in the relative contribution of those networks. We examined the similarity and differences in the pattern of network activity across these three classes of mental states. In this paper, we report a novel study testing a constructionist model of the mind in which participants generated three kinds of mental states (emotions, body feelings, or thoughts) while we measured activity within large-scale distributed brain networks using fMRI.

Yet, growing evidence points to the constructionist hypothesis that mental states emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological processes that map to large-scale distributed brain networks. Scientists have traditionally assumed that different kinds of mental states (e.g., fear, disgust, love, memory, planning, concentration, etc.) correspond to different psychological faculties that have domain-specific correlates in the brain.

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