But anxiety is essentially an active, and activating, emotion: it drives you to do things, usually too many things.
These negative behaviors and experiences often activate emotion-sensitive parts of the brain and higher order capacities (planning, delaying gratification, using logic) literally get less neuronal energy.
On the other hand, negative expressions were avoided since they are known to strongly activate emotion-related brain regions [26], therefore leading to possible sex differences in brain activation.
Anger, as we have discussed, is an activating emotion.
These results suggest that expressive music performance activates emotion related structures in listeners and that even a moderate level of musical experience enhances this emotion associated activation and increases the rewarding aspect of music listening, perhaps through the engagement of the mirror neuron system and its interactions with the limbic system via the insula.
For example, one study found that while anticipation of pain (psychological stress) activated emotion-arousal structures, delivery of pain resulted in activation of visceral afferent processing structures as well as cortical modulation of structures in frontal and parietal cortices [43].
The difference between saying something through speech or through a song is that music activates emotions.
When the brain's braking system is activated, emotions become less intense.
These visual stimuli activate an emotion perception process characterized by focusing attention to external events, and accurately understanding the information conducted, which need the full co-operation of the investigated individuals [11].
