ANATOMICAL BASIS OF EMOTION

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During the current funding period we have concentrated on the recognition of emotion from visually presented stimuli (mostly facial expressions of emotion), and on primary emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness). Building on this foundation, we now propose an in-depth exploration of two unelucidated and elusive aspects of emotion processing, enactment (expression of emotion) and feeling (experience of emotion), while continuing the investigation of emotion recognition in greater detail. We also plan to enlarge the scope of our investigations, to include social emotions. We will test a series of specific hypotheses to address the following key questions: (a) What are the neuroanatomical systems responsible for processing different primary emotions (e.g., happiness, disgust)? (b) Are there identifiable neural systems responsible for processing different social emotions (e.g., pride, guilt)? (c) To what extent do overt and covert emotional processing draw on different neuroanatomical systems? A final aim of this project is to maintain and expand the component of the Program's Patient Registry concerned with disorders of emotion. Our approach relies on the hypothesis-driven investigation of groups of subjects with focal brain damage, using state-of-the-art neuroanatomical and neuropsychological methods. The rationale for the new phase of the program is threefold. First, emotion is a central aspect of neurobiology. It is not possible to have a comprehensive understanding of mind and brain processes without factoring in the role of emotion. Second, the impairments of emotion which follow brain dysfunction have devastating consequences in everyday life, extending from suffering at the personal level to major social burdens. Third, the investigation of emotion has lagged behind as a theme in neurobiology, and is only recently being explored in a systematic fashion. We believe that bringing the study of human emotion into mainstream neuroscience is a high priority, and that the lesion method can add uniquely to contributions made by functional imaging and electrophysiological approaches. The findings from the proposed studies will help improve diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases in which impairments of emotion figure prominently.