The Cognitive-Emotional Brain ─ From Interactions to Integration

The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and itscorollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for manyyears. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however,suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyondthe debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognitioninteract and are integrated in the brain.

The amygdala is often viewed as thequintessential emotional region of the brain, but Pessoa reviews findings revealing that many of itsfunctions 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 analternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward andmotivation, Pessoa also proposes the dual competition model, which explainsemotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at bothperceptual and executive function levels. He considers the broader issue of structure-functionmappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotionalprocessing, highlighting their connectivity properties. As new theoretical frameworks of distributedprocessing 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 certainbehaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.

Luiz Pessoa is Professor of Psychology, member of the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion, and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.