ABSTRACT
Emotions also play a crucial role for guiding social behavior in most social species, including humans and primates. This chapter considers various theories of emotion, both historical and contemporary, and then places these theories into the context of the known neuroscientific basis of emotional processing. Emotions are transient in nature, although the emotional status of stimuli is stored in long-term memory. The dominant alternative view to that of an undifferentiated “limbic brain” in the contemporary literature is to postulate different categories of emotion. The chapter also considers how social information is extracted from facial expressions and eye gaze. It shows that how the same brain networks are used to process both social stimuli as well as nonsocial stimuli with affective properties. Evidence for the neural basis of theory of mind has come from two main sources: functional imaging studies of normal participants and behavioral studies of patients with brain lesions.
