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Emotion processing in Huntington's disease: A disproportionate impairment in anger
Authors:
CALDER, A.J., KEANE, K., LAWRENCE, A.D., YOUNG, A.W. & Barker, R.
Reference:
Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 161
Year of publication:
2004
CBU number:
5890
Abstract:
We present a detailed analysis of emotion processing in patients with manifest Huntington's disease (HD). In contrast to previous research showing a disproportionate impairment in recognising facial signals of disgust in HD patients, anger was most severely impaired in the current study. This was particularly evident in patients with unimpaired scores on the Benton unfamiliar face matching test; hence, the anger impairment for facial expressions cannot be attributed to deficits in basic face processing skills. A disproportionate anger impairment was also evident for recognition of vocal signals of emotion. Similarly, an anger deficit was observed on a test of conceptual knowledge of emotion, while performance on other emotions was intact. The close relationship between anger and disgust may explain the inconsistency between our current findings and earlier research. This interpretation is supported by the HD patients' performance on an adapted version of an experiment addressing the association among three disgust subcategories and each of three facial cues (Rozin et al., 1994, JPSP 66) ñ nose wrinkle (associated with offensive smells), mouth gap (associated with offensive tastes), and upper lip curl (associated with moral violations relating to disgust, e.g., sexual abuse), a form of disgust that is frequently accompanied by anger. While patients and controls could identify the association between subtypes of disgust relating to nose wrinkle and mouth gap, their performance with the moral (anger-related) subtype was at chance. The relationship between these results and our recent work implicating the ventral striatum and dopamine system in anger processing will be discussed.