The University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute & School of Psychology, St. Lucia 4072, Australia.
Neuroimage. 2012 Jul 16;61(4):805-11. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.03.044. Epub 2012 Mar 23.
The cerebellum has an important role in the control and coordination of movement. It is now clear, however, that the cerebellum is also involved in neural processes underlying a wide variety of perceptual and cognitive functions, including the regulation of emotional responses. Contemporary neurobiological models of emotion assert that a small set of discrete emotions are mediated through distinct cortical and subcortical areas. Given the connectional specificity of neural pathways that link the cerebellum with these areas, we hypothesized that distinct sub-regions of the cerebellum might subserve the processing of different primary emotions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify neural activity patterns within the cerebellum in 30 healthy human volunteers as they categorized images that elicited each of the five primary emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. In support of our hypothesis, all five emotions evoked spatially distinct patterns of activity in the posterior lobe of the cerebellum. We also detected overlaps between cerebellar activations for particular emotion categories, implying the existence of shared neural networks. By providing a detailed map of the functional topography of emotion processing in the cerebellum, our study provides important clues to the diverse effects of cerebellar pathology on human affective function.
小脑在运动的控制和协调中起着重要作用。然而，现在已经清楚的是，小脑也参与了多种感知和认知功能的神经过程，包括情绪反应的调节。当代情感神经生物学模型断言，一小部分离散的情绪是通过不同的皮质和皮质下区域来调节的。鉴于将小脑与这些区域连接起来的神经通路的连接特异性，我们假设小脑的不同亚区可能有助于不同基本情绪的处理。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来识别 30 名健康志愿者的小脑内的神经活动模式，当他们对引发五种基本情绪（快乐、愤怒、厌恶、恐惧和悲伤）的图像进行分类时。支持我们的假设，所有五种情绪都会在小脑的后叶引起空间上不同的活动模式。我们还检测到特定情绪类别之间的小脑激活重叠，这意味着存在共享的神经网络。通过提供小脑情感处理功能拓扑的详细图谱，我们的研究为小脑病变对人类情感功能的多种影响提供了重要线索。
