Effects of Lesion Variables and Emotion Type on the Perception of Facial Emotion

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to consider the effects of valence, motoric direction (i.e., approach/withdrawal), and arousal on the perception of facial emotion in patients with unilateral cortical lesions. We also examined the influence of lesion side, site, and size on emotional perception. Subjects were 30 right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and 30 left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) male patients with focal lesions restricted primarily to the frontal, temporal, or parietal lobe. Patient groups were comparable on demographic and clinical neurological variables. Subjects were tested for their ability to match photographs of four facial emotional expressions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Overall, RHD patients were significantly more impaired than LHD patients in perceiving facial emotion. Lesion side, but not site, was associated with motoric direction and valence dimensions. RHD patients had specific deficits relative to LHD patients in processing negative and withdrawal emotions; there were no group differences for positive/approach emotions. Lesion size was not significantly correlated with accuracy of emotional perception.

Dysfunctions of Facial Emotion Recognition in Adult Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Influence on interpersonal difficulties

“…Traditionally, the right hemisphere is considered to be prevalent in the decoding of EFE (Etcoff, 1984;Bowers, Bauer, Coslett, & Heilman, 1985;Bowers, Blonder, Feinberg, & Heilman, 1991;Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1996;Mandal, Asthana, & Maitra, 1998;Mandal et al, 1999;Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 2001) and particularly for negative EFE (Adolphs et al, 1996;Mandal et al, 1998;Anderson, Phelps, Spencer, & Fulbright, 2000;Adolphs et al, 2001). This is consistent with the theory that the right hemisphere is preferentially associated with withdrawal behaviours, while the left hemisphere is involved in approach behaviours (Davidson, Ekman, Saron, Senulis, & Friesen, 1990).…”

Review of Emotion Recognition in Stroke Patients

“…In order to study facial emotion recognition, participants were asked to discriminate, identify or match a range of facial emotional expressions to either photographs, cartoons or line drawing stimuli, depending on the study [25,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. Studies varied in the use of either black and white [25,31,32,38] or color facial photographs [39].…”

“…In later years, several studies regarding the performance of patients with brain damage in perceiving facial expressions were reported. These studies showed that individuals with RBD experienced greater difficulty in processing emotional faces than individuals with LBD and normal controls [6,7,25,26,30,35,39,41,43,44,48,54,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70]. In contrast, most studies found no differences between RBD and LBD patients in the processing of emotional faces [27,31,45,60], and one study found that LBD patients were more impaired than RBD patients [71].…”

Recognizing Emotion from Facial Expressions: Psychological and Neurological Mechanisms

“…In regard to the perception and recognition of emotion, some studies with brain-damaged subjects have provided data in support of the valence hypothesis (Borod, Koff, Lorch, & Nicholas, 1986;Mandal et al, 1999;Schmitt, Hartje, & Willmes, 1997), whereas others have provided more support for the right hemisphere hypothesis Borod et al, 1998). Findings from functional imaging have contributed little to the question of cortical hemispheric asymmetry because hemispheric contrasts have usually not been explicitly calculated (but they have investigated asymmetric involvement of subcortical structures) (cf.…”