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LeDoux comments at the beginning of his book that emotion has not been a very popular topic in the neurosciences. When contrasted with other brain functions, emotions were seen as too complex or simply too “messy” to trace accurately in the nervous system. Despite these difficulties, considerable progress has been achieved in the neurophysiology of emotion and this book provides an excellent summary of recent advances, particularly as LeDoux is one of the researchers who has contributed significantly to this progress.
The first part of The Emotional Brain reviews the study of emotions from Darwin, James, and Freud to our current conceptualizations. On the basis of this summary of prior work, LeDoux concludes “that the basic building blocks of emotion are neural systems that moderate behavioral interactions with the environment, particularly behaviors that take care of fundamental problems of survival” (p. 125). Therefore, emotions are automatic response systems that elicit behaviors helpful to survival. LeDoux believes that to the extent that an animal has developed consciousness, then emotions become feelings but that awareness need not be a necessary aspect of the emotional repertoire of an organism that has developed, through evolution, separate appraisals and responses to distinct environmental triggers. In humans, these emotional responses are accompanied by feelings states that evolved as part of the increasing complexity of the nervous system. Each appraisal and response subsystem can be differentiated to deal with various situations (danger, safety, mating, etc.), however, which in conscious beings give rise to different feeling tones.
The subsystem that LeDoux has studied has to do with the appraisal and response to situations of pain or danger that result in fearful behavior. The exposition of his own research forms the heart of his book. Although this research is restricted to experiments of negative conditioning performed on rats, the results of these stud