This comprehensive review of the neuropsychology of emotion and the underlying neural mechanisms, is divided into four sections: background and general techniques, theoretical perspectives, emotional disorders, and clinical implications.

Written in an engaging, accessible style, this book synthesizes the growing body of knowledge on the neuropsychology of emotion and identifies practical clinical implications. The author unravels the processes that comprise a single emotional event, from the initial trigger through physiological and psychological responses. She also examines how patterns of emotional responses come together to motivate complex behavioral choices. Grounded in theory and research, the book discusses relevant syndromes and populations, reviews available assessment instruments, and describes how deficits in emotional processing affect cognition, daily functioning, and mental health.

This book, a member of the Series in Affective Science, is a unique interdisciplinary sequence of articles on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion by some of the most well-known researchers in the area. It explores what is known about cognitive processes in emotion at the same time it reviews the processes and anatomical structures involved in emotion, determining whether there is something about emotion and its neural substrates that requires they be studied as a separate domain. Divided into four major focal points and presenting research that has been performed in the last decade, this book covers the process of emotion generation, the functions of amygdala, the conscious experience of emotion, and emotion regulation and dysregulation. Collectively, the chapters constitute a broad but selective survey of current knowledge about emotion and the brain, and they all address the close association between cognitive and emotional processes. By bringing together diverse strands of investigation with the aim of documenting current understanding of how emotion is instantiated in the brain, this book will be of use to scientists, researchers, and advanced students of psychology and neuroscience.

This volume represents a comprehensive overview of the neuropsychology of emotion and the neural mechanisms underlying emotional processing. It draws on recent studies utilizing behavioral paradigms with normal subjects, the brain lesion approach, clinical evaluations of patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders, and neuroimaging techniques. The book opens with an introduction summarizing each chapter and pointing to directions for future research. The first section is on history, the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of emotion, and techniques that have been widely used to examine emotional processing- neuropsychological assessment and neuroimaging. Theoretical perspectives on emotion are offered next, including psychological, social-cognitive, neurobiological, and neuropsychological models. A set of chapters on the neural substrates of emotion deals with a spectrum of emotional conditions: elation and mania, sadness and depression, anxiety and stress, anger and impulsivity, and apathy and flat affect. The book concludes with clinical implications, including a description of emotional deficits in neurological and psychiatric disorders (e.g., stroke, head injury, depression, and schizophrenia). Highlighted in this section is an overview of rehabilitative treatments and brain interventions for emotional processing deficits. This authoritative volume will be an important resource and text for neuropsychologists, clinical psychologists, speech-language pathologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, neurologists, rehabilitation specialists, and their students and trainees.

A study that goes beyond the debate over functional specialization to describe the ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but Pessoa reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. He counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, Pessoa also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. He considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. As new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, Pessoa concludes, a truly dynamic network view of the brain will emerge, in which "emotion" and "cognition" may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.

Some investigators have argued that emotions, especially animal emotions, are illusory concepts outside the realm of scientific inquiry. However, with advances in neurobiology and neuroscience, researchers are demonstrating that this position is wrong as they move closer to a lasting understanding of the biology and psychology of emotion. In Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp provides the most up-to-date information about the brain-operating systems that organize the fundamental emotional tendencies of all mammals. Presenting complex material in a readable manner, the book offers a comprehensive summary of the fundamental neural sources of human and animal feelings, as well as a conceptual framework for studying emotional systems of the brain. Panksepp approaches emotions from the perspective of basic emotion theory but does not fail to address the complex issues raised by constructionist approaches. These issues include relations to human consciousness and the psychiatric implications of this knowledge. The book includes chapters on sleep and arousal, pleasure and fear systems, the sources of rage and anger, and the neural control of sexuality, as well as the more subtle emotions related to maternal care, social loss, and playfulness. Representing a synthetic integration of vast amounts of neurobehavioral knowledge, including relevant neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry, this book will be one of the most important contributions to understanding the biology of emotions since Darwins The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals