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Neuroscience in the 21st Century pp 1469–1501Cite as

Limbic Cortex: The Functional Neuroanatomy of Emotion and Hedonic Processing

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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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Correspondence to Morten L. Kringelbach .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior, The Rockefeller University, New York, New York, USA

    Donald W. Pfaff

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

    Nora D. Volkow

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Kringelbach, M.L. (2016). 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/10.1007/978-1-4939-3474-4_46

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