Reciprocal links between emotion and attention

Attention and emotion share many reciprocal links. Both attention and emotion involve distributed neural networks of highly interactive cortical and subcortical brain regions that are in a position to regulate processes related to perception, action, and memory. This chapter reviews evidence from human functional neuroimaging investigation indicating that dedicated brain systems are specifically tuned to process emotional information. In particular, it discusses how emotional processing can interact with attentional systems, focusing on the neural mechanisms by which emotion can affect the allocation of attention, as well as the degree to which selective attention in turn influences emotional processing. Moreover, reciprocal interactions between emotion, attention, and cognition have potentially important implications for understanding a number of psychiatric diseases. An abnormal modulation of attention by emotion, mood, or past affective experiences has now been observed by both behavioral and imaging studies in a variety of conditions, including anxiety, phobia, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, or schizophrenia. This constitutes a new challenge for cognitive neuroscience, which can now be powerfully addressed by neuroimaging research. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.