ABSTRACT
The quest to find the neurobiological root of emotions has been ongoing for millennia—since the ancient Greeks’ attribution of emotional states to imbalances among blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Although emotional states are now placed squarely within the domain of the mind and brain, a precise understanding of how emotions arise has yet to be determined. If you ask most students of psychology or neuroscience to tell you about the neural basis of emotion processing, they will likely mention the limbic system. Indeed, the limbic system was originally proposed to be this center for emotional processing. As will be described in the following, the conception of the limbic system has turned out to be at least as useful for understanding mnemonic function as it has been for understanding emotional processes. Although many of the key players involved in emotion processing are within the limbic system, how those regions interact with one another, and with other cortical and subcortical regions, remains an active topic of investigation.
