Mixed emotions may not be mixed after all

This sentence stopped me in my tracks. I read on:

“As their name would imply, we tend to think of mixed emotions as a blend of different, often contrasting, emotions — but new research suggests that may not be the case.

In their recent paper in Cerebral Cortex, Anthony Vaccaro and team gathered fMRI data from 27 participants as they watched a short film called One Small Step.”

” . . . neural activity suggested they weren’t just rapidly shifting between positive and negative affective states. Mixed feelings were associated with specific patterns of activity in the amygdala and nucleus accumbens, which differed from patterns seen during exclusively positive and negative emotions. According to the authors, this finding suggests that mixed emotions are a separate emotional experience, rather than being a true ‘mix’ of two or more feelings. . . their analyses also showed that state changes in several areas . . . allowed them to predict moments when participants would switch between new emotional states.”

My experience is that this is true for animals as well. And this look into brain circuitry helps me understand why simply shifting between emotions doesn’t feel quite right (and would be inefficient, I think?) but that this “flavor” of feeling is its own unique phenomenon. It is for me.

I’m leaning on my own experience, of course, meaning what happens inside my own body & mind. (Talk about a biased perspective!) But that starting place led me long ago to create the Auto Check-in, as I could literally feel the difference in me when I volunteered my attention vs when it was directed or demanded. It was nice many years later to have science confirm that volitional behavior was different in the brain than cued or conditioned responses.

How does your mileage vary on this?

Read the article here:  https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/mixed-emotions-may-not-be-mixed-after-all