Abstract
Emotion serves an important role in people’s daily life, especially essential for cognitive functions such as learning and memory. Normal functioning of emotion affects the survival of individuals and species as well as their adaptation to the environment. Researchers have accumulated lots of evidences in research of emotion in animals and humans over years. Nonetheless, the critical questions about how emotion modulates memory and how the neural circuits serving emotion and memory interact remain to be clarified. This review summarized research from brain imaging and neuropsychology, in order to elucidate neural mechanisms of memory and emotion processing as well as emotional modulation on memory. Based on existing evidences, we postulated a theoretical framework to be further examined in future research in this direction. We hypothesized that emotional arousal and valence influence memory processing in the amygdala-hippocampus circuit via distinct pathways: emotional arousal modulates memory by activating the fronto-parietal attentional network, whereas emotional valence modulates memory through the interaction with fronto-striatal reward/punishment systems.
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