In the mind of the beholder neuronal mediators for the effect of emotional experience on quality of life

It has been suggested that Quality Of Life (QOL) is greatly affected by the individual way in which one emotionally experience the world. The nature of the emotional experience, however, is particularly divergent among people. It seems that this individual uniqueness depends more on mental representations than physical attributes of a stimulus. In line with this idea, it was suggested that subjective emotional experiences are determined by the individual tendency to either focus attention on internal self-oriented or external world-grounded signals. This personal characteristic depends by and large on the unique operating system of attention and awareness, as driven mainly by vigilance or cognition. Accordingly, an individual bias for enhanced focus on negative signals can be attributed to modified attention operations through fast engagement, slow disengagement, or poor signal differentiation. In other words, a resilient affective style may be associated with weak reaction and fast recovery from negative stressful events, while affective vulnerability may result in excessive response to and long standing distress from the same stressful event. Thus, the ability to assign appropriate emotional significance to incoming information and to form suitable associations between stimuli and emotional state are probably essential for QOL. The present chapter aims to present possible brain mechanisms that subserve the individual emotional experience, and through that mediate QOL