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Abstract:
Recent studies indicate that disgust may be served by a
separate neural substrate. Patients with Huntington's disease show
a disproportionate impairment in recognising facial signals of
disgust, and fMRI research has shown that disgust facial
expressions engage different brain areas (insula and putamen) to
other facial affects. Interpretation of these studies, however, is
contingent on whether they have identified a system that is
specialised for processing facial signals of disgust, or a
'supramodal' system involved in recognising human signals of this
emotion from all sensory modalities. We address this issue in a
case study of NK, a 25-year-old man with damage to the left insula
and left basal ganglia. NK showed a highly selective impairment in
recognising facial and vocal disgust signals, and reduced
self-assessed experience of disgust. NK's deficits are consistent
with damage to a supramodal system underlying the recognition of
disgust from multiple modalities.
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