Cerebellum, Embodied Emotions, and Psychological Traits

Daniela Laricchiuta; Eleonora Picerni; Debora Cutuli; Laura Petrosini

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-99550-8_16

Cerebellum, Embodied Emotions, and Psychological Traits

Adv Exp Med Biol. 2022:1378:255-269. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-99550-8_16.

Authors

Daniela Laricchiuta¹, Eleonora Picerni², Debora Cutuli^{2

3}, Laura Petrosini²

Affiliations

¹ IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy. daniela.laricchiuta@gmail.com.
² IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy.
³ Department of Psychology, University "Sapienza" of Rome, Rome, Italy.

PMID: 35902476
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-99550-8_16

Abstract

This chapter addresses how the embodiment approach may represent a unifying perspective for examining the cerebellar role in emotional behavior and psychological traits. It is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather it can be a good starting point for advancing the cerebellar neural mechanism underlying embodiment. Our goal is to provide illustrative examples of embodied emotions and psychological traits in the emerging field of emotional and cognitive cerebellum. We illustrate how the cerebellum could be an important hub in the embodiment processes, associated with empathic abilities, impaired emotional identification and expression (as occurring for example in the presence of alexithymia), and specific psychological constructs (i.e., hypnotizability).

Keywords: Alexithymia; Cerebellar lobule IV/V; Cerebellar lobule VI; Crus 1; Crus 2; Embodiment; Empathy; Hypnotizability.

MeSH terms

Cerebellum*
Emotions*
Magnetic Resonance Imaging