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The term somatization has generated confusion since it was originally formulated. This conceptual difficulty leads to limitations in the development of diagnostic processes, in advancing the theoretical knowledge, and the establishment of a significantly effective treatment. Given the various multi-causal factors such as environmental, genetic, biological and psychosocial, the emotional processes or cognitive-emotional processes could provide an emotional-integrative factor that has been little studied. This paper reviews the latest research on the processes that integrate cognition and emotion associated with somatization, using a search for articles in English and Spanish on MEDLINE and Dialnet from 2002 to 2012, with the search terms "somatization", "emotion" and "mental process". It has been studied processes such as emotional recognition, attentional processes, cognitive reappraisal, expectation and the mediation of negative affectivity inter alia. Neurophysiological research highlights the activity of the prefrontal areas, the amygdala and cingulate cortex in subjects with somatization, suggesting a deficit in emotional regulation processes that modulates the Central Nervous System. Finally, the relevance of some treatment approaches are speculated and some lines of cognitive-emotional processes research in somatization are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions represent an important key for the social relationships. They produce physiological responses for preparing the organism to adopt a behavioral actions related with survival. Facial expressions provide the most important clues in the emotional states in other individuals. However, it is not well understood the neural basis of facial expression processing. Due to their excellent temporal resolution, event-related potentials (ERPs) allow us to investigate the temporal course of the various stages implied in processing a cognitive function. Many studies have explored the ERPs to facial emotional expressions reporting different effects over the ERP components. This paper is aimed to determine the effect of emotional facial expression over the early face specific component N170, using a paradigm in which emotional expression is an infrequent condition in a gender detection oddball task. The paradigm was built using frequently presented (70 %) male faces without emotional expression (neutral faces), randomly mixed with female faces that appeared to a smaller frequency (30 %). The results show significant differences of amplitude between N170 component obtained under fear or happiness infrequent condition and the neutral infrequent condition. The modulation of this component represents a physiological response to the recognition of the facial emotional expressions and could reflect the automatic activation of the emotional neural system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]