Emotion forms a central part of our everyday human experience. Events or objects within our environment that invoke emotion are not only given value, but affect our attentional processes and enhance our formation of memory. Neuroimaging techniques, including modern optogenetic approaches, have led to a growing awareness that emotion, unlike many other psychological functions, is fairly un-encapsulated, interacting with and influencing multiple other areas of functioning. As well as the effects upon attention, perception, memory and learning, emotion plays a core part in our social relationships, and is essential for empathetic behaviour in our interactions with others. Emotional cues act as powerful reinforcers; they impact strongly upon …show more content…
Neuroimaging studies continue to demarcate these brain mechanisms by which unattended emotional stimuli are processed preferentially. The dominant hypothesis is that the amygdala rapidly detects the emotional salience of a certain stimulus after brief and superficial representational processing. Subsequent to this, the amygdala then enables more detailed sensory processing via projections to sensory cortices, facilitating attention and perception. Anatomical studies show that the amygdala mediates this via both direct and indirect influence on sensory cortices; direct reciprocal connections are present between the amygdala and sensory cortices, alongside a projection from the central nucleus of the amygdala to the cholinergic nucleus basalis of Maynert which allows for an indirect ascending neuromodulatory effect upon the same …show more content…
Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging technique with high temporal resolution, has been able to show in human studies that discriminatory responses to emotional faces can occur as early as within 100-120ms. This is in comparison with a much slower 170ms for characteristic face-related responses. Similarly, an early response to aversive stimuli of 120-160ms has been shown by human electrophysiological studies with use of intracranial