Fear recognition deficits after focal brain damage

Abstract

Fear recognition deficits in neurologic patients may be attributable to task difficulty factors rather than damage to putative neural systems dedicated to fear perception.

Impaired recognition of negative facial emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia

“…Emotions of disgust and anger were often confused with each other, as were the emotions of fear and surprise, and sad faces were often confused with neutral expressions. These patterns of errors were very similar to those reported in previous studies with normal adults (Anderson et al, 2000;Rapcsak et al, 2002). Surprise faces were mislabeled as fear but also as happy, revealing the ambiguous valence of this emotion.…”

“…The existence of specific anatomical substrates for individual emotions is a matter of debate (Calder et al, 2001;Rapcsak et al, 2002), and FTD is a progressive disease affecting mainly the frontal and anterior temporal regions (Bocti et al, 2004). FTD impairment in emotion recognition is likely to be caused by atrophy in orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and amygdala, and our study cannot address the unique contribution of these areas.…”

“…In either case, the difference between negative and positive displays raises the possibility that task difficulty might underlie patients' poor performance. In other words, FTD patients, due to their general cognitive deficits, may be disproportionately impaired in the most difficult trials, which happen to be the ones depicting negative emotions (Rapcsak et al, 2002). We addressed this problem in two ways.…”

“…Second, we compared patients' recognition of 'difficult' and 'easy' negative emotions. Past literature reveals that healthy adults often err in the recognition of facial expressions of fear, but are almost flawless in the recognition of facial expressions of anger (Ekman & Friesen, 1975;Rapcsak et al, 2002). Thus, a level-of-difficulty account would predict that FTD patients should be severely impaired in the recognition of fear (a difficult emotion to recognize) while being relatively spared in the recognition of anger (an easy emotion to recognize).…”

Impaired Conscious Recognition of Negative Facial Expressions in Patients with Locked-in Syndrome

“…Since it has been suggested that apparently selective impairments in recognition of specific emotions may be ascribed to different levels of task difficulty (Rapcsak et al, 2000), we aimed at verifying whether such a bias could account for LIS patients' impairment in recognizing negative emotions. To address this issue, we needed to refer to well established difficulty ratings for processing facial emotions.…”