Emotional memory functions of the human amygdala

Affective space is conceptually parsed according to two principal factors or underlying dimensions—arousal and valence. The aforementioned analysis supports a basic dissociation between the amygdala’s contribution to arousal versus valence functions in memory. Whereas the amygdala mediates arousal effects during conditioned emotional learning and across various stages of explicit memory processing (eg, encoding, consolidation, and retrieval),...