[Involvement of amygdala in the emotional processing of pain].

This review will discuss the recent studies about the role of amygdala in pain processing. Pain has a strong emotional component, and the amygdala plays a major role in emotional behaviours. An increasing number of evidences implicated the amygdala in the process of pain encoding and modulation. Amygdala may integrate the nociceptive information from the spinal cord and the trigeminal nucleus with information of other sensory modalities from thalamic and cortical areas, and generate the emotional reactions and the behavioral responses of pain. On the other hand, amygdala may also be involved in pain modulation through connections with periaquiductal gray (PAG) , rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), and other brain stem areas.