The N1 and D1 stimuli were missed in some cases, because the subjects sometimes had stopped feeling these stimuli in the course of the preceding VAS experiment.
Why do we continue exposing ourselves to this negative feeling-inducing stimulus?
Phenomenal consciousness or the subjective experience of feeling sensory stimuli is fundamental to human existence.
Alterations shown in the AN group in response to the sad film clip, such as looking away, could be construed as an attempt to avoid any negative feelings the stimulus was evoking (see Davies et al., 2011 for further discussion on this).
Insula is also activated by non-artistic stimuli; however, the feeling that these stimuli produce in the observer differs qualitatively from that determined by artworks.
The scale shares basic similarities with a scale created by Zeki and Ffytche4 in a study of GY, a patient who was hemianopic after a lesion to V1. GY claimed to have vague feelings of stimuli presented to his blind field.
In contrast, pain is the subjective experience of feeling a noxious stimulus (however, in certain central neuropathies in humans it can arise without external stimuli).
It is often described as a faint whisper of emotion, defined specifically as a positive (like) or negative (dislike) evaluative feeling toward a stimulus that can occur both consciously and unconsciously (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2004).
The first rating screen asked subjects to indicate, for each of the 9 GEMS emotion categories (Zentner et al. 2008), how strongly they had experienced the corresponding feeling during the stimulus presentation.
If an analgesic is active at the level of the telencephalon and reduces behavioural responses (Xie et al. 2004) then the animal, at least, has the possibility of feeling a noxious stimulus as painful (however this interpretation is dependent first, on the behaviour being non-reflexive and second, on the existence of the necessary neural hardware; see below).
I have very mixed feelings about the stimulus package.
