Affective experience colours everyday perception and cognition, yet its fundamental and neurobiological basis is poorly understood. The current debate essentially centers around the communalities and specificities across individuals, events, and emotional categories like anger, sadness, and happiness. Using fMRI during the experience of these emotions, we critically compare the two dominant conflicting theories on human affect. Basic emotion theory posits emotions as discrete universal entities generated by dedicated emotion category-specific neural circuits, while psychological construction theory claims emotional events as unique, idiosyncratic, and constructed by psychological primitives like core affect and conceptualization, which underlie each emotional event and operate in a predictive framework. Based on the findings of 8 a priori-defined model-specific prediction tests on the neural response amplitudes and patterns, we conclude that the neurobiological basis of affect is primarily characterized by idiosyncratic mechanisms and a common neural basis shared across emotion categories, consistent with psychological construction theory. The findings provide further insight into the organizational principles of the neural basis of affect and brain function in general. Future studies in clinical populations with affective symptoms may reveal the corresponding underlying neural changes from a psychological construction perspective.

情感体验影响着日常的感知和认知，但人们对其基本和神经生物学基础知之甚少。目前的争论主要围绕个人、事件和愤怒、悲伤和快乐等情绪类别的共同性和特殊性展开。在体验这些情绪的过程中使用 fMRI，我们批判性地比较了关于人类影响的两个主要相互冲突的理论。基本情绪理论将情绪视为由专门的情绪类别特定神经回路产生的离散的普遍实体，而心理建构理论则认为情绪事件是独特的、异质的，并由核心情感和概念化等心理原语构建，它们是每个情绪事件的基础，并在一个预测框架。基于 8 个关于神经反应幅度和模式的先验定义模型特定预测测试的结果，我们得出结论，情感的神经生物学基础主要以特殊机制和跨情绪类别共享的共同神经基础为特征，与心理学一致建构理论。这些发现进一步深入了解了影响和大脑功能的神经基础的组织原则。未来对具有情感症状的临床人群的研究可能会从心理建构的角度揭示相应的潜在神经变化。我们得出结论，情感的神经生物学基础主要以特殊机制和跨情绪类别共享的共同神经基础为特征，这与心理建构理论一致。这些发现进一步深入了解了影响和大脑功能的神经基础的组织原则。未来对具有情感症状的临床人群的研究可能会从心理建构的角度揭示相应的潜在神经变化。我们得出结论，情感的神经生物学基础主要以特殊机制和跨情绪类别共享的共同神经基础为特征，这与心理建构理论一致。这些发现进一步深入了解了影响和大脑功能的神经基础的组织原则。未来对具有情感症状的临床人群的研究可能会从心理建构的角度揭示相应的潜在神经变化。