Frontiers in Emotion Science

Frontiers in Emotion Science is a Specialty Section of Frontiers in Psychology. In the past ten years, we have seen an enormous explosion of emotion studies. For decades, investigations of human emotion processes were largely confined to a well-defined area of science. This is no longer the case, and researchers from a number of different fields are currently bringing new questions and novel methodologies to the study of emotion as traditionally conceived. At least three different trends structure the new science of emotion. First, new approaches contribute to overruling the traditional boundaries between cognition and emotion. Psychological functions, processes and brain structures traditionally viewed as typically devoted to emotions contribute to many cognitive processes like attention or decision-making. Next, in accord with that, an evolutionary inspired and motivated approach to human emotion takes its lead from phylogenic continuity between humans and animals, and capitalizes on this continuity to generate new hypotheses about the emotional brain and mind. A third tendency is that the intrinsic relation between consciousness and emotional perception is no longer taken for granted. Whereas classical views have emphasized the conscious aspects of emotions, evidence now shows that many emotional processes can bypass subjective consciousness, but have potential behavioral consequences. These three tendencies are closely related, and they amount to replacing the traditional top-down approach with a bottom up perspective in emotion research, which Frontiers in Emotion Science wants to promote and contribute to its further development. Frontiers in Emotion Science intends to be a platform for emotion science across a very broad spectrum of topics and methods, including behavioral, physiological and brain imaging studies, to promote research into the normal and pathological functioning of emotion from the perspective of psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. The Specialty Section welcomes papers reporting basic research on emotions including animal research, developmental issues and clinical populations. Frontiers in Emotion Science will also welcome integrative and interdisciplinary approaches combining these different disciplines, methodological articles presenting a cutting-edge technology advancement that opens new avenues for investigation on the mind/brain mechanisms underlying emotions, as well as theoretical papers of scholarly value. Our ultimate aim is to promote research on emotions at a time when affective aspects of the mind/brain are viewed as determinants in many daily behaviors and psychopathological states, and integrative approaches are considered as the most promising avenue to understanding them. Frontiers in Emotion Science welcomes the following tier 1 article types: Book Review, Editorial, General Commentary, Hypothesis & Theory, Methods, Mini Review, Opinion, Original Research, Perspective, Review, Specialty Grand Challenge and Technology Report. All articles must be submitted directly to Frontiers in Emotion Science, where they are processed by the associate and review editors of the Specialty Section. All articles published in Frontiers in Emotion Science will be subjected to the Frontiers Evaluation System after online publication. Authors of the original research articles with the highest impact, as judged by many expert readers, will be invited by the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Psychology to write a prestigious Frontiers Focused Review - a tier 2 article. This is referred to as "democratic tiering". The author selection is based on article-level impact metrics of Original Research published in the Frontiers Specialties. Focused Reviews are centered on the original discovery, place it in a wider context, and aim to address the wider audience across all of Psychology.