Abstract: To clarify the physiological mechanism of human emotions is a great challenge for psychologists and neuroscientists. Previous studies trended to separately investigate the peripheral response patterns and brain mechanisms of emotions. With the development of emotional electrophysiology and cognitive neuroscience, many researchers have recently proposed several integration models of physiological mechanism of emotions from perspectives of interaction between peripheral and central nervous system. The typical examples are emotion circuit model and neurovisceral integration model. The former emphasized a processing way from peripheral to central (bottom-up) to try to explain the mechanism of the formation of emotion experience, and the latter a processing way from central to peripheral (top-down) trying to elucidate the mechanism of emotion regulation. Future research should build a more comprehensive physiological model of human emotions by drawing on these two models and combining with the recent new research results about the neural mechanisms of emotional information processing.

Key words: human emotions, physiological mechanism, emotion circuit model, neurovisceral integration model