Neuroimaging for the Affective Brain Sciences, and Its Role in Advancing Consumer Neuroscience

Abstract

To fully understand the driving behaviour of a car it is absolutely inevitable to investigate all its hidden parts underneath the surface and to find out what their functions are. To fully understand human behaviour we need to complete traditional behavioural measures with neuroimaging data that allow us to look inside the brain. Only via neuroimaging methodology do we have access to underlying brain processes that guide our behaviour without leading to any conscious reportable traces that show up in questionnaires. On top of that, especially when emotion-related explicit responses are required questionnaires provide us with biased responses due to cognitive influences. These responses can be far away from true underlying emotion-related information. The discrepancy between biased and unbiased emotion-related information processing is of utmost interest for both basic affective neuroscience and consumer neuroscience