Emotional Games

Although emotions are something that we can all feel, to a greater or lesser extent, we know very little about how they’re actually generated by our brains. Most scientific studies of emotions rely on volunteers passively looking at things like photos or videos and measuring how they respond. They also tend to use pre-defined descriptions of emotions, such as fear, disgust or happiness. But real life is much more interactive, and the feelings we experience don’t fit neatly into boxes. To delve deeper into the complex world of emotions, researchers have devised an unusual new experiment: an old-fashioned arcade game, played by volunteers undergoing fMRI brain scans and other measurements. As the participants work through various scenarios in the game that have been designed to evoke particular feelings, researchers can observe activity and interactions between distinct networks within the brain, shedding light on how different processes help to produce emotions.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Joana Leitão and colleagues
• Laboratory for Behavioral Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Fundamental Neuroscience, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, November 2020