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Facial emotion recognition after bilateral amygdala damage: Differentially severe impairment of fear.
Authors:
Calder, A.J., Young, A.W. Rowland, D., Perrett, D.I., Hodges, J.R. & Etcoff, N.L.
Reference:
Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13, 699-745
Year of publication:
1996
CBU number:
3460
Abstract:
Although the amygdala is widely believed to have a role in the recognition of emotion, a central issue concerns whether it is involved in the recognition of all emotions or is more important to some emotions than to others. We describe studies of two people with impaired recognition of facial expressions in the context of bilateral amygdala damage; DR and SE. When tested with photographs showing facial expressions of emotion from the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series, both DR and SE showed deficits in the recognition of fear. Problems in recognising fear were also found using photographic quality images interpolated ('morphed') between prototypes of the 6 emotions in the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series to create a hexagonal continuum (running from happiness to surprise to fear to sadness to disgust to anger to happiness). Control subjects identified these morphed images as belonging to distinct regions of the continuum, corresponding to the nearest prototype expression. However, DR and SE were impaired on this task, with problems again being most clearly apparent in the region of the fear prototype. An equivalent test of recognition of morphed identities of 6 famous faces was performed normally by DR, confirming the dissociability of impairments affecting the recognition of identity and expression from the face. Further 2-way forced-choice tests showed that DR was unable to discriminate fear from anger, but could tell happiness from sadness without difficulty. The finding that the recognition of fear can be differentially severely affected by brain injury is consistent with reports of the effects of bilateral amygdala damage in another case (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio and Damasio, 1994, 1995). The recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions may, to some extent, therefore be linked to specific neural substrates.