Review article

Brain and emotion: Cognitive neuroscience of emotions

Anita Deak orcid.org/0000-0001-6862-4993 ; Institute of Psychology, University of Pecs

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience of emotions is a rapidly growing field. It focuses on the neural basis of emotional and social processes and strongly contributes to the better understanding of the biological basis of emotional processing. It integrates the results of neural and behavioral levels of analysis in healthy and clinical populations as well. The main topics and questions in cognitive neuroscience of emotions are the role of emotions in information processing, their neural basis for both cortical and sub-cortical levels, the perception of arousing and neutral stimuli, emotions and memory, the role of emotion in decision making, detecting emotional versus neutral faces, and individual differences in emotionality and their biological background. Brain imaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging–fMRI) are used both for examining functional connections between emotion and perception, attention, memory and decision making, and for localizing specific psychological functions to specific brain areas. In this paper we discuss not only current research trends and methods but some important brain areas responsible for emotions (e.g., amygdala, anterior cingular cortex, prefrontal cortex) as well.

Keywords

cognitive/affective neuroscience; International Affective Picture System (IAPS); individual differences; fMRI

Hrčak ID:

81460

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/81460

Publication date:

20.12.2011.

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