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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Apr 15.
Published in final edited form as: Neuron. 2012 Feb 23;73(4):653–676. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.02.004

Figure 4.

Figure 4

Ingredients of Feelings in a Cognitive Workspace. An emotional feeling is hypothesized to be a representation of a global organismic state initiated by an external stimulus. The representation includes sensory information about the stimulus and the social and physical context, information about the survival circuit that is active, information about CNS arousal, body feedback information, and mnemonic information about the stimulus situation and the state itself. When such a global organismic state is categorized and labeled a conscious feeling of a certain type (e.g. a feeling of fear, pleasure, disgust, etc) results. To the extent that any of these components differ in human and non-human species, the nature of the resulting state would differ as well.