Facial emotion recognition after subcortical cerebrovascular diseases

Abstract

The present-study is intended to study the pathological manifestation of subcortical cerebrovascular disease in the aspect of facial emotion recognition. Subcortical structures were believed to be responsible for the recognition of facial expressions. Universal facial expressions of happy, disgust, fear, surprise, sad, and angry were validated and used as the prototype expressions. The study was conducted on 2 patient groups consisting of 19 patients in each group with damages in the left and the right hemisphere due to subcortical cerebrovascular disease. They were asked to recognize the interpolated emotional expressions intended to explore whether they can recognize the emotions and the small changes between different basic emotions. Significant group differences were found between patient groups and control group in accurately responding to the emotion. The major findings presented in this study are consistent with previous studies which showed the impairment of recognition of facial emotions is related to lesion to the subcortical areas. The study provided preliminary evidence to the role of the subcortical region in emotion recognition, including the thalamus and the internal capsule, which were seldom studied in previous researches. Furthermore, the results showed that the right hemisphere has the advantage of emotion recognition over the left hemisphere.