A Functional Architecture of the Human Brain: Emerging Insights from the Science of Emotion

The 'faculty psychology' approach to the mind, which attempts to explain mental function in terms of categories that reflect modular 'faculties', such as emotions, cognitions, and perceptions, has dominated research into the mind and its physical correlates. In this paper, we argue that brain organization does not respect the commonsense categories belonging to the faculty psychology approach. We review recent research from the science of emotion demonstrating that the human brain contains broadly distributed functional networks that can each be re-described as basic psychological operations that interact to produce a range of mental states, including, but not limited to, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and so on. When compared to the faculty psychology approach, this 'constructionist' approach provides an alternative functional architecture to guide the design and interpretation of experiments in cognitive neuroscience.