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Loss of disgust: Perception of faces and emotions in Huntington’s disease.
Authors:
Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A.W., Calder, A.J., Karnat, A., Lange, H., Hömberg, V., Perrett, D.I. & Rowland, D.
Reference:
Brain 119(5), 1647-1665
Year of publication:
1996
CBU number:
3468
Abstract:
Face perception and emotion recognition were investigated in agroup of people with Huntington's disease and matched controls. Inconventional tasks intended to explore the perception of age, sex,unfamiliar face identity (Benton test), and gaze direction from the face,the Huntington's disease group showed a borderline impairment of gazedirection perception and were significantly impaired on unfamiliar facematching. With a separate set of tasks using computer-interpolated('morphed') facial images, people with Huntington's disease were markedlyimpaired at discriminating anger from fear, but experienced less difficultywith continua varying from male to female, between familiar identities, andfrom happiness to sadness. In a further test of recognition of facialexpressions of basic emotions from the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series,interpolated images were created for six continua that lay around theperimeter of an emotion hexagon (happiness - surprise, surprise - fear,fear - sadness, sadness - disgust, disgust - anger, anger - happiness). Indeciding which emotion these morphed images were most like, people withHuntington's disease again showed deficits in the recognition of anger andfear, and an especially severe problem with disgust, which was recognisedonly at chance level. A follow-up study with tests of facially and vocallyexpressed emotions confirmed that the recognition of disgust was markedlypoor for the Huntington's disease group, still being no better than chancelevel. Questionnaires were also used to examine self-assessed emotion, butdid not show such striking problems. Taken together, these data revealsevere impairments of emotion recognition in Huntington's disease, and showthat the recognition of some emotions is more impaired than others. Thepossibility that certain basic emotions may have dedicated neuralsubstrates needs to be seriously considered; among these, disgust is aprime candidate.