Objective: To assess Emotion Recognition ability (ER) from different face-parts in subjects affected by temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Background: Several studies highlighted the role of amygdala in processing emotional and social signals, particularly facial expression of fear. TLE is frequently characterized by damage involving medial temporal lobe regions. Facial ER deficits are common in these patients and widespread across negative emotions (Meletti et al., Epilepsia in press). Both clinical and experimental studies suggest that human amygdala could be especially sensitive to decode the eye-region of the face. Material: We evaluated 50 healthy volunteers (CTRL) and two distinct patients groups, defined by anatomo-electro-clinical investigation as medial TLE (MTLE, n=63) and lateral TLE (LTLE, n=17). Pictures of facial affect, taken from Ekman & Friesen series (1976), and used in a previously published protocol (Meletti et al., Neurology 2003), were cropped to obtain pictures in which only mouth or eye-region of the face was visible. Design/Methods: ER, both from mouth-region (ERm) and eye-region (ERe), was tested by matching an item with the appropriate emotional label from a given list: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust and anger. Results: Mean correct recognition in CTRL was 77.0% and 69.6% in ERe and ERm respectively. Sadness, and fear were better recognized from eye-region while disgust was more easily identifiable from mouth expression. Minimal differences in recognition rate was found for happiness and anger. The MTLE group resulted impaired at ERe (69.9% correct recognition) respect to both LTLE (ERe=75.5%) and CTRL group. The MTLE group resulted impaired relative to CTRLs in the recognition of sadness, fear, and anger. Conclusions/Relevance: These results suggest that MTLE impairment in ER could arise from inability to make use of eye-region cues, even when the subjects is forced to look at the eyes, at variance with that reported for fear recognition in bilateral amygdala damage (Adolphs et al., Nature 2005).
Impairment in Decoding Eye-Region Emotional Content in Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy
CANTALUPO, Gaetano;
2009-01-01
Abstract
Objective: To assess Emotion Recognition ability (ER) from different face-parts in subjects affected by temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Background: Several studies highlighted the role of amygdala in processing emotional and social signals, particularly facial expression of fear. TLE is frequently characterized by damage involving medial temporal lobe regions. Facial ER deficits are common in these patients and widespread across negative emotions (Meletti et al., Epilepsia in press). Both clinical and experimental studies suggest that human amygdala could be especially sensitive to decode the eye-region of the face. Material: We evaluated 50 healthy volunteers (CTRL) and two distinct patients groups, defined by anatomo-electro-clinical investigation as medial TLE (MTLE, n=63) and lateral TLE (LTLE, n=17). Pictures of facial affect, taken from Ekman & Friesen series (1976), and used in a previously published protocol (Meletti et al., Neurology 2003), were cropped to obtain pictures in which only mouth or eye-region of the face was visible. Design/Methods: ER, both from mouth-region (ERm) and eye-region (ERe), was tested by matching an item with the appropriate emotional label from a given list: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust and anger. Results: Mean correct recognition in CTRL was 77.0% and 69.6% in ERe and ERm respectively. Sadness, and fear were better recognized from eye-region while disgust was more easily identifiable from mouth expression. Minimal differences in recognition rate was found for happiness and anger. The MTLE group resulted impaired at ERe (69.9% correct recognition) respect to both LTLE (ERe=75.5%) and CTRL group. The MTLE group resulted impaired relative to CTRLs in the recognition of sadness, fear, and anger. Conclusions/Relevance: These results suggest that MTLE impairment in ER could arise from inability to make use of eye-region cues, even when the subjects is forced to look at the eyes, at variance with that reported for fear recognition in bilateral amygdala damage (Adolphs et al., Nature 2005).
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