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Abstract:
A growing body of evidence suggests the human amygdala is
involved in the social communication of emotion. Separate case
studies of patients with selective bilateral amygdala damage have
revealed impairments in the appraisal of fear, from facial (Adolphs
et al., 1994, Calder et al., 1996) as well as vocal expressions
(Scott et al., 1997). Therefore, the amygdala appears to play an
important role in the modality-independent analysis of signals of
fear. In order to directly test this hypothesis in a single
patient, we studied patient SP who sustained bilateral amygdala
damage due to right anteromedial temporal lobectomy and left
amygdalar gliosis. Previously we found that when asked to rate the
appropriateness of verbal emotion labels of different facial
expressions, SP was impaired in evaluating expressions of fear,
sadness, and disgust (Anderson et al., 1996). In contrast, when
asked to evaluate different vocal expressions of affect, SP
revealed generally intact performance, with the exception of her
impaired appraisal of disgust. SP performed normally on various
non-emotional measures of auditory and visual processing.
Therefore, we provide evidence that impairments in the analysis of
fearful facial and vocal expressions are dissociable following
amygdala damage.
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