Ventromedial frontal lobe damage affects interpretation, not exploration, of emotional facial expressions.

ABSTRACT: Recognizing and distinguishing the emotional states of those around us is crucial for adaptive social behavior. Previous work has shown that damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe (VMF) impairs recognition of subtle emotional facial expressions and affects fixation patterns to face stimuli. However, whether this relates to deficits in acquiring or interpreting facial expression information remains unclear. We tested 37 patients with frontal lobe damage, including 17 subjects with VMF lesions, in a series of emotion recognition tasks with different gaze manipulations. Subjects were asked to rate neutral, subtle and extreme emotional expressions while freely examining faces, while instructed to look only at the eyes, and in a gaze-contingent condition that required top-down direction of eye

SUBMITTER: Vaidya AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6657350 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature