Aversive emotions are primarily processed in the cortical right hemisphere. Now neurobiologists, neurologists, and biopsychologists from Bochum and the university clinic Essen discovered that the cerebellum evinces a left-sided prevalence in regions associated with emotion regulation and memory updating. Given the contralateral connectivity patterns of the cerebellar and the cortical cortices, these data show that the cerebellum contributes to emotional regulation like fear extinction through hemispheric specialization, mirroring the lateralization observed in cortical fear processing networks.

Pakusch J, Nio E, Grosch T, Ernst TM, Batsikadze G, Güntürkün O, Timmann D, Mark MD, Evidence for lateralization of emotions in the cerebellum, J. Neurol., 2025, 272: 435, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-025-13183-0.