Illness Management from the Perspective of Cognitive Neuroscience

The fronto-parietal executive systems play a major role in developing patients’ analytic, dispassionate views of illness and symptoms whereas more primitive amygdala-based emotional circuits generate patients’ reactive emotional perspectives. The interactions among systems associated with pain perception, executive function, and emotion in response to primes for specific illnesses and symptoms will provide a picture of the neural underpinnings of patients’ illness representations.