Commentary on “Becoming Aware of Feelings”

Richard Lane and David Garfield present a well-reasoned analysis of research on brain mechanisms underlying conscious awareness of emotion. There could hardly be a topic of greater centrality to psychoanalysis. They do an excellent job in conveying the exciting findings and methods of cognitive neuroscience to a broad community interested in understanding the neural basis for emotional awareness.

Basic to psychoanalysis are Freud's ideas concerning how cognitive and affective control develops from the primary process of early infancy. On these issues of development, Lane & Garfield are relatively silent. In a section on the topic of “speculation on self-regulation,” they cite imaging studies showing that when attempting to ward off arousal from a sexual stimulus or negative emotion from pictorial input, adults show increased activity in a neural network including the anterior cingulate gyrus. Their idea is that the cingulate is part of a neural network involved in regulating the emotions. There is good evidence (Bush, Luu, & Posner, 2000) that separate areas of the cingulate serve to regulate both emotions and cognitions and that this circuitry is a critical part of an executive attention network that develops strongly in early and middle childhood (see Fig. 1).

In their paper, Lane & Garfield quite properly concentrate on the mechanisms of emotional awareness as