[Functional neuroimaging of emotions and bipolar disorder]

In this review we comment the results of functional neuroimaging works of emotions on normal population and some parallelisms with the emotional changes of bipolar disorder correlated with their functional neuroimaging. Initially we refer the emotional ontogenetical development of human brain based on regional cerebral sanguineous flow evolution (FSC). Secondly we describe the differences of FSC between the externally generated emotions versus internally; between positive versus negative emotions and the correlation between FSC and some facial expressions. When FSC of bipolar disorder is compared with normal emotions on general population, we observe that temporal cortex, the prefrontal medial and insular anterior cortex, change their perfusion with the switch or the change of emotional expression. It is possible to determine if the findings obtained in samples of healthy subjects and bipolar patients converge in a dimensional model, or if on the contrary they support the categorical hypotheses, moving the emotional aspects to a second term on bipolar disorder.