You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a neuroimaging technique which measures brain activity as reflected in regional cerebral blood flow. This study used PET technology to localize the neural experience of normal human emotion, and to examine the effects of sensory versus recollected emotional stimuli. Twelve healthy, right-handed, female subjects aged eighteen to thirty who exhibited intense emotional responses to pretest material were presented with happy, sad, disgust, and neutral stimuli as both film and as recall of personal experiences. Both the film- and the recall-generated emotions showed activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and thalamus, suggesting that these areas are not specific to sensory versus recall emotion. However, film-generated (sensory) emotion was associated with symmetrical brain activity significantly greater than that of recall-generated emotion in the occipito-temporal and temporopolar cortex, amygdala, hippocamal formation, hypothalamus, and lateral cerebellum. The authors suggest that the medial prefrontal region, as a possible site for working memory, could be involved in the conscious experience of emotion, execution of the task that generates emotion, or regulation of the expression of emotion. Other studies have already associated areas of the thalamus with the integrated expression of emotion. It is also proposed that the amygdala and hippocampus as implicated in animal studies of emotion may be responsible for attaching emotional significance to external sensory stimuli, and may not be involved in internally generated emotional responses. (This paper won first prize for best poster at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, Boston, MA, 1994.)