Abstract
Over the last few decades, work in affective neuroscience has increasingly investigated the neural basis of emotion. A central debate in the field, when studying individuals with brain damage, has been whether emotional processes are lateralized or not. This review aims to expand this debate, by considering the need to include a hierarchical dimension to the problem. The historical journey of the diverse literature is presented, particularly focusing on the need to develop a research program that explores the neural basis of a wide range of emotional processes (perception, expression, experience, regulation, decision making, etc.), and also its relation to lateralized cortical and deep-subcortical brain structures. Of especial interest is the study of the interaction between emotional components; for example, between emotion generation and emotion regulation. Finally, emerging evidence from lesion studies is presented regarding the neural basis of emotion-regulation strategies, for which the issue of laterality seems most relevant. It is proposed that, because emotion-regulation strategies are complex higher-order cognitive processes, the question appears to be not the lateralization of the entire emotional process, but the lateralization of the specific cognitive tools we use to manage our feelings, in a range of different ways.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilFor more than half a century, there has been a debate in neuropsychology on the issue of hemispheric asymmetry in emotion, linked to a broader discussion about the role of cortical brain regions in emotion
We have a field that suggests that emotional experience is somehow preserved after cortical lesions, but is distorted or altered, in various ways. Explaining this paradox requires firstly that we identify a source of emotion generation that is outside the cortex, and secondly to identify the contribution of neuropsychological components that produce the distortion in emotional processes
What are we to make of the current state of our understanding of how we regulate feelings, and the neural basis of this process? Firstly, it is clear that the core of emotional experience is closely tied to evolutionarily ancient brain systems underpinning consciousness, in the upper brain stem and associated subcortical structures
Summary
The early years of neuropsychological research on emotion were dominated by tasks of emotion perception, and findings on the role of hemispheric asymmetry in people with unilateral brain lesions (see [2] for review). An independent strand of research looked at how brain damage could alter the experience of emotion in survivors, and explore the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms This was studied in patients with denial of deficit (anosognosia) after right-sided brain lesions. These patients often did not show the negative emotional responses to their paresis that one might expect Most notably, they had fewer episodes of tearfulness and emotional breakdown (so-called ‘catastrophic’ reactions) than those with left hemisphere lesions [15,16,17,18,19,20]. This pattern of findings led to hemispheric accounts of emotion, of which the best known is that of Davidson and colleagues [34,35] This is the suggestion of a right frontal system involved in negative (withdrawal-related) emotional states, with left frontal regions associated with positive (approach-related) emotion. Anosognosia would result from a disruption of a negative emotional system (right-sided), leaving the patient with only a (left-sided) positive emotion system
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