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- Thinking
- Emotions
Signals from Within
Emotions shape our lives. That's why we're so good at recognizing and empathizing with them.
18.12.2025
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- Thinking
- Emotions
The Roots of Emotions
Emotion scientists seek to identify the basic patterns of our feelings.
25.10.2025
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- Glossary
Facial expressions
Five muscle groups control the visible movements on the surface of our faces – and this applies to everyone in the world. Neuroscientists emphasize universal, evolutionarily anchored reactions as the reason for this. For this reason, the basic emotions of fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, and joy leave similar traces on the face everywhere, which we can usually identify reliably even in strangers.
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- Grundlagen
- Anatomy
The Brain Stem
Only thumb-sized, the brain stem regulates the body's vital systems.
05.08.2025
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- Page
Glossar
15.03.2017
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- Thinking
- Emotions
What are Emotions?
What we feel shapes our emotional life – and helps us react correctly and quickly.
11.09.2025
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- Glossary
emotions
Neuroscientists understand "emotions" to be complex response patterns that include experiential, physiological, and behavioral components. They arise in response to personally relevant or significant events and generate a willingness to act, through which the individual attempts to deal with the situation. Emotions typically occur with subjective experience (feeling), but differ from pure feeling in that they involve conscious or implicit engagement with the environment. Emotions arise in the limbic system, among other places, which is a phylogenetically ancient part of the brain. Psychologist Paul Ekman has defined six cross-cultural basic emotions that are reflected in characteristic facial expressions: joy, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust.
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- Glossary
Apraxia
Difficulty performing a purposeful movement, such as grasping a glass or cutting with scissors. Depending on the form of apraxia, speech or facial expressions may also be affected. The cause is not muscle weakness or paralysis, but damage to one or more areas of the brain, e.g., as a result of a stroke. In other cases, however, it is congenital.
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- Topic
Emotions
Feelings give spice to our lives and influence many of our decisions – whether we want them to or not.
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- Glossary
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease is one of the most common neurological disorders, caused by the death of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, leading to a neurotransmitter imbalance in the basal ganglia. Symptoms usually begin late in life with mild tremors (resting tremor), increasing stiffness of the limbs, and slowed voluntary movements (bradykinesia). Later, postural instability, balance disorders, and difficulty walking occur. Other typical features include rigid facial expressions (hypomimia), a shuffling gait, and muscle stiffness (rigor). The disease is incurable, but its symptoms can be treated with medication (e.g., L-dopa, dopamine agonists) or surgery involving deep brain stimulation (brain pacemaker).
