“The Possibility of an Island”: The Insula and its Role in Consumers’ Emotion

Abstract

Today, consumer cognitions and behaviors cannot be investigated without taking into account affective phenomena. Indeed,emotion has been obtaining credibility and legitimacy for about three decades in marketing academia (Cohen, Pham andAndrade 2008). Moreover, the recent advances in cognitive and affective neuroscience have highlighted that affect is deeplyassociated with and inherent to cognition. Since the 1990’s, neuroscientific scholars have demonstrated that efficientdecision-making cannot occur without the recruitment and proper functioning of specific cortical or sub-cortical structures,initially conceived of as so-called “limbic” structures, now commonly referred to as the “reward” network. Prominent among these structures are the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the striatum, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the amygdalar nuclei and the insular cortex or insula (island in Latin). Whereas a marketing scholar could not previously investigate consumer behaviors or attitudes without including affect-laden hypotheses, the same investigator could hardly propose today emotionrelated hypotheses without marshalling neuroscience theories and constructs (Roullet and Droulers 2010). The main objective of this paper is to convince the reader of the above and to present succinctly as evidence a brief review of one of the previously mentioned structure. Actually, the insula – regularly described as an affectively active area in neuroscientific and neuromarketing publications – is particularly mobilized in situations eliciting moral or visceral disgust at different levels.