Impairment of Emotional Facial Expression and Prosody Discrimination Due to Ischemic Cerebellar Lesions

Abstract

A growing literature points to a specific role of the cerebellum in affect processing. However, understanding of affect processing disturbances following discrete cerebellar lesions is limited. We administered the Tübingen Affect Battery to assess recognition of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody in 15 patients with a cerebellar infarction and 10 age-matched controls. On emotional facial expression tasks, patients compared to controls showed impaired selection and matching of facial affect. On prosody tasks, patients showed marked impairments in naming affect and discriminating incongruencies. These deficits were more pronounced for negative affects. Our results confirm a significant role of the cerebellum in processing emotional recognition, a component of social cognition.

The Cerebellum in Social Cognition

“…Patients with left lateral but not medial cerebellar tumors including Crus I exhibited deficits in perceiving human motion (Sokolov et al, 2010; Figure 1B). On the other hand, in 15 patients tested 1-5 weeks after cerebellar stroke, no significant overall impairments were found in perception of emotions from prosody and photographs of faces (Adamaszek et al, 2014). However, sub-analyses revealed difficulties in selecting the facial expression matching a specific emotion, naming the emotional expression of prosody that may or may not correspond to the semantic content, and matching faces to prosody with similar emotional expression.…”

The Role of the Cerebellum in Unconscious and Conscious Processing of Emotions: A Review

“…Moreover, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies have shown the involvement of the cerebellum in conscious processing of emotional facial expressions [69,81,85].…”

“…Clinical studies in patients with cerebellar damage have also highlighted the involvement of the cerebellum in emotional recognition, allowing proper social cognition regardless of stimulus (visual or auditory), particularly for negative emotions [69,72], and in more complex social cognition domains. This has become known as the Theory of Mind (ToM) [73,76,77].…”

Cerebellar Clustering and Functional Connectivity During Pain Processing

“…In animals (e.g., mice and rodents), the posterior vermis orlimbicvermis [62]playsa centralrolein fear conditioning, mediatedbypain;inhumans,the cerebellar areas involved could also include posterior cerebellar hemispheres together with the vermis as suggestedby our results. Adamaszek et al provided preliminary evidence of that in a groupof cerebellar stroke patients with a specific impairment for emotionalprocessing and associated lesions in the posterior cerebellum [65]. This could be related to an integrated processing in emotion and cognition in humans [66]: an evolutionary frontalization of the emotion parallel to the frontal lobedevelopment, well representedbythis cerebellar network.…”