Cortical electrical stimulation (CES) provides a unique window into the neural architecture supporting human emotion by perturbing local circuits while revealing distributed network dynamics. Yet despite decades of clinical use in stereo-EEG and subdural mapping, the emotional phenomena elicited by CES remain conceptually heterogeneous and methodologically inconsistent, reflecting the absence of a unified interpretative framework.

Here, by outlining the conceptual foundations of emotion and examining the scattered evidence from CES, we show how definitional and methodological divergences undermine cumulative insight. We first situate CES findings relative to competing models of emotion, highlighting how assumptions about discreteness, appraisal, and construction shape the interpretation of evoked responses. We then assess how theoretical stance, emotion features, stimulation parameters, anatomical constraints, and task conditions are reported across studies, revealing major inconsistencies in methodological transparency than may account for systematic biases in affective outcomes.

Finally, we propose the eMAP operational framework —a minimal reporting structure organised around four pillars: Emotion, Modulation, Architecture , and Phenomenology . This framework aims to guide future research by allowing perturbational evidence to be interpreted in a cumulative and comparable manner, while improving the clinical utility of CES for probing the functional architecture of emotion and refining surgical risk assessment.