The neurology of disgust

Abstract

Emotions form part of the fabric of our minds, and the scientific attempts to map these dimensions onto the underlying neural substrates date back to the first half of the last century. It has long been suggested that emotional functions are associated with subcortical structures (e.g. Cannon, 1927; Kluver & Bucy, 1937; Hess, 1954). James Papez (1937) was the first to postulate that emotional processing is based on an interconnected cortical-subcortical system, for which later the term ‘Papez circuit’ was coined. The idea of a ‘limbic system’, defined as a functional entity responsible for all emotional experience and emotional expressions, was subsequently put forward by Paul MacLean in the early 1950s. Neuroanatomically, the ‘limbic system’ was associated with neural structures surrounding the midbrain (MacLean, 1993). A different view on the neuroanatomy of emotions emerged during the 1970s, emphasizing the role of the right hemisphere in emotion processing (Schwartz et al ., 1975). However, neither of these conceptual frameworks, dominating the clinical neurosciences well into the mid-1990s, allow for selective impairments of specific emotions. In 1994, Adolphs and colleagues reported an intriguing finding, which changed the way we have to think about how emotions are organized within the brain (Adolphs et al ., 1994). They investigated a person suffering from Urbach–Wiethe disease, a rare hereditary disorder which causes bilateral calcifications of the medial temporal lobes, affecting particularly the amygdala. In this person, a selective deficit in recognizing fearful faces was found, while recognition of other basic emotions such as happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust and anger was preserved. The prominent role of the amygdala in processing …