Brain bit 1- the Amygdala
hard to say, spell and difficult to visualise (see bad diagram left) but this is a pretty fancy piece if 'kit'.
Some psychologists call this the brains 'emotional computer', which tries to find out the emotional significance of events. For example people with damage in this area can have problems 'reading' emotions on other peoples faces, such as fear or anger. Think of this for yourself - how do you know that someone is afraid? We can just 'tell' without any thinking. The person with amygdala damage may have to learn to read the expression in a more deliberate way (e.g. slanting down mouth, wide open eyes -see below).
But this area is quite complex - Psychosurgeons in the the 1950's often destroyed parts of the amygdala in aggressive criminals to calm them down but the side effects of this were often truly grim...
In one 'patient' he was so afraid that other bits of his brain might be destroyed that he wrapped his head in newspapers, bags and rags!!!

Reading emotions...
I bet you have a pretty good idea of what these emotions are even though they are not the greatest of pictures.
Which one is fear? It is not hard is it? but how do you do it?

Attempts to teach computers / robots to recognise facial emotions is still in its early stages and they are finding it quite tricky. The fact that most children (unless they have particular psychological problems) find this sort of task really easy shows that the human brain is a very impressive learning 'device'.
Psychological work in this area is starting to pay off and will help us to support people with emotion recognition problems, (As well as teaching CCTV cameras to recognise when you are about to throw a 'wobbly'!)