Posed emotional expression in unilateral brain damaged patients

The facial expressions of six basic emotions were posed by two groups of right (N = 23) and left (N = 34) brain damaged patients and by a control group of normal subjects (N = 28). The posed expressions were examined by means of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) which provides analytical and objective scoring, as by a subjective scale of appropriateness of expression. Results indicated no difference between controls and patients with a lesion in the right or left hemisphere. These findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the right hemisphere plays a specific role in the control of posed facial expression. No relationship was observed between posed emotional expressions and facial paralysis or the presence of oral apraxia.     

Spontaneous facial expression of emotions in brain-damaged patients

Spontaneous facial expression of emotion was studied in two groups of right (N = 23) and left (N = 39) brain-damaged patients and in a control group of normal subjects (N = 28). To elicit emotions four short movies, constructed to produce positive, negative or neutral emotional responses, were used. The method used to assess the facial expression of emotions was the Facial Action Coding System. Brain-damaged patients showed less facial responses to emotional stimuli than normal controls, but no difference was observed between subjects with right and left-sided lesions either with global or disaggregated data analyses, inconsistent with the hypothesis of a specialization of the right hemisphere for facial emotional expressions. An unexpected difference was observed in response to the unpleasant movie. Both normal controls and left brain-damaged patients often averted their gaze from the screen when unpleasant material was displayed, whereas right brain-damaged patients rarely showed gaze aversion. This finding suggests that the degree of emotional involvement or manner of coping with stressful input may be reduced as a result of right brain damage.     

The expression and perception of facial emotion in brain-damaged patients

This study examined the expression and perception of facial emotion in patients with unilateral cerebrovascular pathology. Subjects were 12 right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD) aphasic, and 16 normal control (NC) right-handed males. Expressions were elicited during posed and spontaneous conditions. Both positive and negative emotions were studied. RBDs were significantly impaired, relative to LBDs and NCs, in expressing and perceiving facial emotion. There were no group differences as a function of condition, but there were differences as a function of emotional valence. Qualitative performance differences also were observed. There was no evidence that the ability to produce a particular emotion was related to the ability to identify the same emotion. Overall, these findings support the notion that the right cerebral hemisphere is dominant for expressing and perceiving facial emotion.     

A preliminary characterization of lexical emotional expression in right and left brain-damaged patients

Disorders in nonverbal communication of emotion have been documented in patients with right hemisphere pathology; lexical expression of emotion is virtually unstudied. In this preliminary investigation, emotionally laden slides were used to elicit discourse from right brain-damaged (RBD), left brain-damaged (LBD), and normal control (NC) subjects. New techniques were developed to examine the ability of these subjects to express emotion in words; formalistic and pragmatic analyses of the discourse were conducted. RBDs, relative to NCs and LBDs, were less successful in using words to convey emotion and produced words of lower emotional intensity. LBD aphasics, despite their linguistic deficits, were comparable to NCs in conveying emotional valence. The data tend to support the speculation that the right hemisphere is dominant for lexical expression of emotion. This study has implications for the neuropsychological investigation of language, emotion, and the brain.     

Psychopathological aspects and emotional behavior in right brain-damaged patients

We investigated 20 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients and 10 controls with chronic motor deficits for differences in anxiety and depression, measured by pshychometric tests, and in aspects of emotional behavior, gauged from videorecordings. We found no group differences in the psychometric scores but, when we correlated these with the behavior scores, we found significant differences in the expression of depression (absent only in RBD patients) and in attitude to illness, ie joking and unconcern (present only in RBD patients). In both groups emotional gesture, facial expression and prosody proved on qualitative analysis to be interrelated, thus demonstrating that emotional behavior has a single cortical-sub-cortical substrate.

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Sommario Sono valutate le differenze tra 20 cerebrolesi ds. e 10 controlli con deficit motori cronici in alcuni aspetti psicopatologici (ansia, depressione) e negli aspetti esteriori di vari comportamenti emozionali registrati con videotapes. Non ci sono differenze tra i 2 gruppi ai test psicometrici, mentre correlando questi risultati con l'analisi qualitativa delle registrazioni emergono differenze tra cerebrolesi ds. e controlli nell'espressione sia di stati depressivi (assente solo nei cerebrolesi ds.) sia di comportamenti umoristici o vacui riguardanti la malattia (presenti solo nei cerebrolesi). In entrambi i gruppi l'analisi qualitativa rivela relazioni tra gestualità, mimica e prosodia emozionali a dimostrazione dell'unicità del substrato anatomo-fisiologico da cui dipende l'espressione dei comportamenti emozionali.

     

Right-sided facial asymmetry in infant emotional expression

In normal adults, emotional expressions tend to be more intense on the left side of the face, while in preschool-age children, no significant bias in facial asymmetry has been found. We examined facial asymmetries during smiling and distress in 59 infants studied longitudinally at 6.5, 10 and 13.5 months of age. In these infants, asymmetric expressions showed a bias toward greater intensity on the right side of the face. The study of infant facial expression may provide clues to the maturation of the cortical control of emotional responses.     

Processing emotional expression and facial identity in schizophrenia

Previous studies showed that schizophrenic patients have a deficit in facial information processing. The purpose of the present study was to test the abilities of patients with schizophrenia and normal controls in emotion and identity matching when these two dimensions were varied orthogonally. Subjects (20 schizophrenic patients and 20 controls) had to report if two faces had the same emotion or belonged to the same person. When the task concerned one type of information (i.e. emotion or identity), the other one was either constant (same person or same emotion) or changed (different person or different emotion). Schizophrenic patients performed worse than controls for both kinds of facial information. Their deficit was more important when the secondary factor was changed. In particular, they performed at chance level when they had to match one emotion expressed by two distinct persons. Finally, correlation analysis indicated that performance/deficit in identity and emotion matching co-varied and that in such tasks performance is negatively correlated with the severity of negative symptoms in patients. Schizophrenic patients present a generalised deficit for accessing facial information. A facial emotion and an identity-processing deficit are related to negative symptoms. Implications for face-recognition models are discussed.     

Correspondence of emotional self-rating with facial expression.

Emotional processing abilities are difficult to measure psychometrically. Ultimately their quantification has to rely on 'subjective' judgment thereby leaving open the problem of response biases. Assessments of autonomic arousal similarly provide a mere unspecified measurement of a specific emotion. A standardized mood induction procedure capable of obtaining reliable happy and sad mood changes in healthy subjects was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this procedure. We performed a two-part experiment using a rater-based analysis of facial expressions. This entailed analyzing the emotion portrayed in the faces. The faces of 24 healthy subjects were videotaped during the mood induction procedure of happiness and sadness, respectively. A group of 20 raters naive to the experimental task and conditions rated the facial expressions on six basic emotions. Results showed that ratings corresponded with the facial expressions, which were reflecting the mood of the task condition. Subjects' facial expressions together with self-ratings demonstrate the successful applicability of this standardized mood induction procedure for eliciting happy and sad mood.     

Appreciation of emotional expressions in the visual and auditory modality in normal and brain-damaged patients

Right-handed patients with right-sided, left-sided or without brain lesions, were tested for their appreciation of pictures of faces and tape-recorded voices carrying emotional expressions. The right hemisphere group was impaired in relation to the left and normal group. On the auditory test the impaired right-sided group showed confusion of all emotional categories. On the visual test, the same patients evaluated all emotional qualities to be happy or neutral. It is suggested that different mechanisms explain these findings: one of defective perceptual analysis, prominent in the auditory test, and one of change of mood in an euphoric direction specific to patients suffering damage to the right hemisphere.     

The perception of positive and negative facial expressions in unilateral brain-damaged patients: A meta-analysis

How the brain is lateralised for emotion processing remains a key question in contemporary neuropsychological research. The right hemisphere hypothesis asserts that the right hemisphere dominates emotion processing, whereas the valence hypothesis holds that positive emotion is processed in the left hemisphere and negative emotion is controlled by the right hemisphere. A meta-analysis was conducted to assess unilateral brain-damaged individuals’ performance on tasks of facial emotion perception according to valence. A systematic search of the literature identified seven articles that met the conservative selection criteria and could be included in a meta-analysis. A total of 12 meta-analyses of facial expression perception were constructed assessing identification and labelling tasks according to valence and the side of brain damage. The results demonstrated that both left and right hemisphere damage leads to impairments in emotion perception (identification and labelling) irrespective of valence. Importantly, right hemisphere damage prompted more pronounced emotion perception impairment than left hemisphere damage, across valence, suggesting right hemisphere dominance for emotion perception. Furthermore, right hemisphere damage was associated with a larger tendency for impaired perception of negative than positive emotion across identification and labelling tasks. Overall the findings support Adolphs, Jansari, and Tranel (2001) model whereby the right hemisphere preferentially processes negative facial expressions and both hemispheres process positive facial expressions.     

Relationship between mood state and information processing of negative versus positive emotional stimuli in brain-damaged patients

The present study investigates the relationship between affective mood state as assessed by self- and hetero-rating scales and information processing of negative versus positive emotional stimuli in unilateral brain-damaged patients. Results show a high positive correlation between depressive mood scores and rating of self-awareness. Left brain-damaged (LBD) patients do not differ significantly from right brain-damaged (RBD) patients on both rating scales. RBD patients mismatch negative emotional stimuli in the nonverbal matching task. Results are discussed with reference to interaction between expression of emotion and cognition. The selective neglect of negative information is interpreted as a more basic emotional impairment.     

Affective impairments in binge drinking: Investigation through emotional facial expression decoding

ObjectiveBinge drinking, an excessive alcohol consumption pattern frequently observed in young people, is known to be associated with psychological and cerebral deficits. While cognitive dysfunctions have been widely investigated, emotional abilities have scarcely been explored. Such an exploration would however offer a more exhaustive understanding of the deficits associated with binge drinking, as well as of the possible transition towards alcohol-dependence.Methods46 young adults (23 binge drinkers, 12 women; 23 control participants, 12 women) were recruited among university students. They performed an emotional recognition task consisting of the visual decoding of six basic emotions (i.e. anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). Accuracy scores and detection thresholds were collected for each emotion.ResultsBinge drinkers showed lower performance than control participants for the decoding of all emotions and increased detection threshold, this later reflecting less ability to capture an emotion. Binge drinking is thus associated with a need for higher emotional intensity to perform correct detection. Moreover, these emotional difficulties appear specifically related to alcohol consumption.ConclusionThese findings reinforce previous experimental evidence of altered emotional processing among binge drinkers, and extend these results for various emotional contents. They support the hypothesis of a continuum between binge drinking and alcohol-dependence, in which massive emotional impairments have been documented. Indeed, these impairments could be involved in the onset and maintenance of excessive alcohol consumption, notably through the established relationship between emotional deficits and social distress.     

Dysfunctional facial emotional expression and comprehension in a patient with corticobasal degeneration

Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) frequently develop orofacial apraxia but little is known about CBD's influence on emotional facial processing. We describe a patient who developed a facial apraxia including an impaired ability to voluntarily generate facial expressions with relative sparing of spontaneous emotional faces. Her ability to interpret the facial expressions of others was also severely impaired. Despite these deficits, the patient had normal affect and normal speech, including expressive and receptive emotional prosody. As patients with corticobasal degeneration are known to manifest both orofacial apraxia and visuospatial dysfunction this patient's expressive and receptive deficits may be independent manifestations of the same underlying disease process. Alternatively, these functions may share a common neuroanatomic substrate that degenerates with CBD.     

Voluntary emotional facial expressions in patients with focal cerebral lesions.

This study investigates the voluntary production of emotional facial expressions in 43 brain-damaged and 9 control subjects. The expressions of right- and left-hemisphere lesion groups did not differ significantly, but those of the anterior lesion group were impoverished relative to the posterior lesion and control groups. Deficits of voluntary expression were dissociable from impairments in "non-emotional" facial-motor functions, dysphasia, and unilateral neglect.     

The face-specific N170 component is modulated by emotional facial expression

Background  

According to the traditional two-stage model of face processing, the face-specific N170 event-related potential (ERP) is linked to structural encoding of face stimuli, whereas later ERP components are thought to reflect processing of facial affect. This view has recently been challenged by reports of N170 modulations by emotional facial expression. This study examines the time-course and topography of the influence of emotional expression on the N170 response to faces.     

Copying procedures in focal brain-damaged patients

We aimed to ascertain whether non-apraxic, focal brain-damaged patients used abnormal constructional procedures. We tested a series of consecutive patients, classified according to lesion locus and side against a matched sample of normal volunteers. Subjects had to copy the Rey-Osterreith Figure, a complex and structured item that explores copying strategies. We used special testing and scoring methods to analyze different steps of the copy. Unlike the controls, the patients did not choose the central elements of the figure as guiding structures. All patient groups followed an equivalent “pathological”, “piecemeal” procedure. Paper presented at the National Congress at Sorrento in 1991 and selected by the Editorial Board of the Journal     

Anosognosia and anosodiaphoria in brain-damaged patients

Anosognosia and anosodiaphoria are terms that have frequently been used to cover a wide variety of different concepts. A review of the literature provides the point of departure for presentation of the methodological problems arising from the use of these terms. We then discuss the concept of anosognosia as a linguistic behavioural pattern arising from the patient's reaction to the "non-accessibility" of a cerebral lesion. Anosognosia can thus be interpreted as behaviourally analogous to neglect. Anosodiaphoria is presented as a form of behaviour determined by the patient's attempt to come to terms with the consequences that a cerebral lesion has for his way of life.     

Cognitive rehabilitation in non-communicative brain-damaged patients

Conscious patients with severe motor and speech disorders have great difficulty interacting with the environment and communicating with other people. Several augmentative communication devices are now available to exploit these patients' expressive potential, but their use often demands considerable cognitive effort. Non-communicative patients with severe brain lesions may have, in addition, specific cognitive deficits that hinder the efficient use of augmentative communication methods. Some neuropsychological batteries are now available for testing these patients. On the basis of such cognitive assessments, cognitive rehabilitation training can now be applied, but we underline that this training must be tailored to single patients in order to allow them to communicate autonomously and efficiently.