Here, we compared MAMs from 148 neuroimaging studies representing emotion categories of fear, anger, disgust, happiness and sadness with ICMs from fearful > neutral and angry > neutral faces from an independent dataset of task fMRI ( n = 1263). One opportunity presented by the resulting meta-analysis maps (MAMs) is as a reference for better understanding the nature of individual contrast maps (ICMs) derived from specific task fMRI data. Meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is an effective method for capturing the distributed patterns of brain activity supporting discrete cognitive and affective processes.