Neuroimaging Approaches to the Study of Emotion

The recent technological revolution in functional neuroimaging has provided new insights into regional brain activity during normal and pathological emotions and has advanced understanding of several neuropsychiatric diseases. The list of different functional imaging tools can, however, be daunting for those not actively working in the area. Additionally, an incomplete knowledge of the nature of the source of the imaging signal can hinder complete understanding of the results of imaging studies. Therefore, in this chapter we outline several of the basic principles behind the use of functional imaging to study emotion. We then briefly describe the most commonly used functional imaging techniques and discuss some of the problems in most of the imaging research in this area. Tic introductory comments arc illustrated with examples from the imaging literature as well as from the authors’ primary work.