Using “big data” from sensors worn continuously outside the lab, researchers have observed patterns of objective physiology that challenge some of the long-standing theoretical concepts of emotion and its measurement. One challenge is that emotional arousal, when measured as sympathetic nervous system activation through electrodermal activity, can sometimes differ significantly across the two halves of the upper body. We show that traditional measures on only one side may lead to misjudgment of arousal. This article presents daily life and controlled study (...) data, as well as existing evidence from neuroscience, supporting the influence of multiple emotional substrates in the brain causing innervation on different sides of the body. We describe how a theory of multiple arousals explains the asymmetric EDA findings. (shrink)

Social cognitive neuroscience examines social phenomena and processes using cognitive neuroscience research tools such as neuroimaging and neuropsychology. This review examines four broad areas of research within social cognitive neuroscience: (a) understanding others, (b) understanding oneself, (c) controlling oneself, and (d) the processes that occur at the interface of self and others. In addition, this review highlights two core-processing distinctions that can be neurocognitively identified across all of these domains. The distinction between automatic versus controlled processes has long been important (...) to social psychological theory and can be dissociated in the neural regions contributing to social cognition. Alternatively, the differentiation between internally-focused processes that focus on one's own or another's mental interior and externally-focused processes that focus on one's own or another's visible features and actions is a new distinction. This latter distinction emerges from social cognitive neuroscience investigations rather than from existing psychological theories demonstrating that social cognitive neuroscience can both draw on and contribute to social psychological theory. (shrink)