The central role of anterior cortical midline structures in emotional feeling and consciousness

Current theories of emotion have often excluded emotional feeling from the core of emotion, thereby associating emotional feeling with high order processing. In contrast, we characterize emotional feeling as a basic process that is fundamentally involved in emotional processing. Emotional feeling is further described by the phenomenal features of unity and qualitativeness. Based on recent imaging data, we assume that neural activity in the anterior cortical midline structures is crucial for constituting emotional feeling. The phenomenal feature of unity could be reflected in the connectivity pattern of the aCMS. What phenomenally is described as qualitativeness may correspond to what is psychologically termed valence.