The neurology of human emotion

Abstract

Emotion can be considered the result of mood (the inner, subjective feelings), affect (the outer, objective manifestations of feeling), drive, and cognitive control. Research in the past several decades suggests a correlation between characteristic emotional disorders and abnormalities involving restricted neuroanatomical regions. Mood appears to be a product of the basal-limbic structures. Affect is more hemisphere influenced and the difference between nonverbal and verbal affect appears to reflect right and left hemispheric function. Drive can be considered a function of midline anterior anatomical structures while cognitive control, the ability to govern action by thought, seems to depend on frontal convexity and/or orbital frontal function. Emotion is a summation of these activities and emotional disorder may follow disturbance to any one or a combination of these separate functions.