In the last century there was a neuroscience of emotion, and today there is a neuroscience of emotion. In between there was a long, dark gap during which neuroscientists regarded emotion as elusive, objectively difficult to define, and thus, not acceptable to study. Reinforcing this attitude was a long philosophical tradition of not trusting emotions, regarding them as unruly phenomena that can wreak havoc on decision-making. As recent research has shown, this prejudice and attitude are profoundly wrong. In the very least, we can say that emotion is always in the loop of reason.
Emotion is an adaptive response, part of the vital process of normal reasoning and decision-making.
It is one of the highest levels of bioregulation for the human organism and has an enormous influence on the maintenance of our homeostatic balance and thus of our well-being. Last but not least, emotion is critical to learning and memory. Emotion is a very adaptive form of physiological response, and it regulates our lives. Emotion is expressed largely in the theater of the body, through posture and facial expression as well as through such internal processes as heart rate and blood pressure. Moreover, all of these bodily responses are fed back to the brain through neural channels as well as humoral channels, which bypass neural signaling.