Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): James Clark, Dr Stuart Watson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The neurobiological understanding of mood, and by extension mood disorders, remains elusive despite decades of research implicating several neuromodulator systems. This review considers a new approach based on existing theories of functional brain organisation. The free energy principle (a.k.a. active inference), and its instantiation in the Bayesian brain, offers a complete and simple formulation of mood. It has been proposed that emotions reflect the precision of – or certainty about – the predicted sensorimotor/interoceptive consequences of action. By extending this reasoning, in a hierarchical setting, we suggest mood states act as (hyper) priors over uncertainty (i.e. emotions). Here, we consider the same computational pathology in the proprioceptive and interoceptive (behavioural and autonomic) domain in order to furnish an explanation for mood disorders. This formulation reconciles several strands of research at multiple levels of enquiry.
Author(s): Clark JE, Watson S, Friston KJ
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Psychological Medicine
Year: 2018
Volume: 48
Issue: 14
Pages: 2277-2284
Print publication date: 01/10/2018
Online publication date: 26/02/2018
Acceptance date: 01/02/2018
Date deposited: 12/03/2018
ISSN (print): 0033-2917
ISSN (electronic): 1469-8978
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291718000430
DOI: 10.1017/S0033291718000430
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
