Mapping and Timing the (Healthy) Emotional Brain: A Review

Abstract

The study of the emotional processing in the brain began from a psychological point of view in the last decades of the 19th century. However, since the discovery of the electrical background of mental activity around 1930, a new scientific way of observing and measuring the functioning of the living brain has opened up. In addition, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has given neuroscientists a (literally) deeper instrument to perform such measurements. With all this technological background, the last decades have produced an important amount of information about how the brain works. In this chapter, we review the latest results on the emotional response of the brain, a growing field in neuroscience.