The Brain's Emotional GPS: Mapping Feelings Across Valence and Arousal

New research shows the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex create a map-like representation of emotions in a two-dimensional valence–arousal space. The interior hippocampus stores broad emotion categories, the posterior hippocampus handles finer distinctions, and the vmPFC tracks relationships between them. Using fMRI, pattern recognition, and the Tolman–Eichenbaum Machine AI model with the Emo-FiLM film dataset, researchers replicated brain patterns and highlighted how greater emotional granularity correlates with better mental health, suggesting affect labeling could help expand the emotional map and aid in treating depression and anxiety.