Affective style and affective disorders: Perspectives from affective neuroscience

Individual differences in emotional reactivity or affective style can be fruitfully decomposed into more elementary constituents. Several separable features of affective style are identified such as the threshold for reactivity, the peak amplitude of response, the rise time to peak and the recovery time. The latter two characteristics constitute components of affective chronometry. The circuitry that underlies two fundamental forms of motivation and emotion-approach and withdrawal related processes-is described. Data on individual differences in functional activity in certain components of these circuits are next reviewed, with an emphasis on the nomological network of associations surrounding individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation. The relevance of such differences for understanding the nature of the affective dysfunction in affective disorders is then considered. The article ends by considering what the prefrontal cortex "does" in certain components of affective style and highlights some of the important questions for future research.