Impairment of social cognition following damage to the prefrontal cortex

Abstract

Objective: To find out the profile of social cognition in patients with lesion in the prefrontal cortex, and to test the hypothesis that prefrontal cortex is involved in the special network of social cognition. Methods: Patients with lesion in orbitofrontal, patients with lesion in dorsolateral prefrontal and healthy controls were administered with a neuropsychological battery for social cognition, including basic emotion recognition from eye area and risk-taking task. Results: Compared with health controls, patients with lesion in orbitofrontal demonstrated an impairment of social cognition, including recognition of such negative emotions as (sadness, disgust and anger, 16.78 ± 2.29, 15.07 ± 3.79, 15.14 ± 2.31 respectively, P<0.05) and risk-taking (0.76 ± 0.19 after reward and 0.81 ± 0.15 after punishment respectively, P < 0.05), but patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions showed no impairment of social cognition (P > 0.05) with their marks of recognizing joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger being 19.60 ± 0.63, 17.73 ± 1.33, 16.46 ± 2.26, 17.53 ± 1.84, 16.20 ± 2.80, 17.20 ± 2.20, and risk-taking (0.68 ± 0.24 after reward and 0.64 ± 0.21 after punishment respectively). Conclusions: The results show that patients with orbitofrontal lesions manifest a deficit in perceiving social information and solving social problem and that the orbitofrontal area may be involved in the special neural network of social cognition.