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Limbic Cortex: The Functional Neuroanatomy of Emotion and Hedonic Processing

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Neuroscience in the 21st Century

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Abstract

Emotion is central to human life and intimately connected with consciousness (Kringelbach and Phillips 2014). Investigating the underlying brain mechanisms can help us understand and potentially treat the serious problems of affective disorders, such as unipolar depression, bipolar disorder, chronic pain, and the worldwide epidemic of obesity. Historically, the link with consciousness has led to a relative neglect of emotion as a subject of systematic scientific inquiry in comparison with other fields, such as cognition. However, the last few decades have seen a significant increase in research on emotion, leading to important new discoveries of the brain mechanisms involved. Importantly, it has become clear that a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of emotion relies on investigating reward and hedonic processing which is the main focus of this chapter.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Kent C. Berridge and Predrag Petrovic for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, OX3 7JX, UK

    Morten L. Kringelbach

  2. Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Morten L. Kringelbach

Authors
  1. Morten L. Kringelbach
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Morten L. Kringelbach .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Rockefeller University Lab. Neurobiology & Behaviour, New York, New York, USA

    Donald W. Pfaff

  2. National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), Rockville, Maryland, USA

    Nora D. Volkow

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Kringelbach, M. (2015). Limbic Cortex: The Functional Neuroanatomy of Emotion and Hedonic Processing. In: Pfaff, D., Volkow, N. (eds) Neuroscience in the 21st Century. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6434-1_46-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6434-1_46-3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6434-1

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