Brain Advance Access originally published online on June 4, 2007
Brain 2007 130(7):1715-1717; doi:10.1093/brain/awm127
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Scientific Commentary |
The neurology of disgust
School of Psychology
University of St Andrews
St Andrews KY16 9JU
Scotland
E-mail: rhs3@st-andrews.ac.uk
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Emotions form part of the fabric of our minds, and the scientific attempts to map these dimensions onto the underlying neural substrates date back to the first half of the last century. It has long been suggested that emotional functions are associated with subcortical structures (e.g. Cannon, 1927
; Klüver & Bucy, 1937; Hess, 1954). James Papez (1937) was the first to postulate that emotional processing is based on an interconnected cortical-subcortical system, for which later the term ‘Papez circuit’ was coined. The idea of a ‘limbic system’, defined as a functional entity responsible for all emotional experience and emotional expressions, was subsequently put forward by Paul MacLean in the early 1950s. Neuroanatomically, the ‘limbic system’ was associated with neural structures surrounding the midbrain (MacLean, 1993). A different view on