A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage
Abstract
Ten years ago, we reported that SM, a patient with rare bilateral amygdala damage, showed an intriguing impairment in her ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing information about facial emotions has been borne out by a number of lesion and functional imaging studies. Yet the mechanism by which amygdala damage compromises fear recognition has not been identified. Returning to patient SM, we now show that her impairment stems from an inability to make normal use of information from the eye region of faces when judging emotions, a defect we trace to a lack of spontaneous fixations on the eyes during free viewing of faces. Although SM fails to look normally at the eye region in all facial expressions, her selective impairment in recognizing fear is explained by the fact that the eyes are the most important feature for identifying this emotion. Notably, SM's recognition of fearful faces became entirely normal when she was instructed explicitly to look at the eyes. This finding provides a mechanism to explain the amygdala's role in fear recognition, and points to new approaches for the possible rehabilitation of patients with defective emotion perception.
Additional Information
© 2005 Nature Publishing Group. Received 7 September; accepted 7 October 2004. We thank all participants for their time and effort; N. J. Cohen and members of his laboratory, D. Hannula and J. Gibbons, for help with the administration and analysis of eye movement data; H. Damasio and M. Koenigs for comments on the manuscript; B. Lewis and K. Scheer for assistance with testing subjects, and R. Henson for help in scheduling their visits. This work was supported by grants from NINDS and NIMH, and a Twenty-first Century Science grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - nature03086-s1.doc
Supplemental Material - nature03086-s2.jpg
Supplemental Material - nature03086-s3.jpg
Supplemental Material - nature03086-s4.jpg
Supplemental Material - nature03086-s5.jpg
Supplemental Material - nature03086-s6.jpg
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 55911
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150319-080547979
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
- National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- NIH
- Created
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2015-03-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field