Emotion recognition from stimuli in different sensory modalities in post-encephalitic patients

Abstract

Emotion recognition from facial and non-facial stimuli was investigated in two post-encephalitic patients a few months after the onset of the disease. One patient who had a lesion relatively restricted to the amygdala and hippocampus experienced difficulty in recognizing fear from facial expressions. In contrast, the other patient who had a lesion that extended beyond the amygdala experienced difficulty in recognizing fear from non-facial (prosodic and written verbal) stimuli. We showed that impairment of emotion recognition was evident within a short duration after encephalitis and that recognizing emotion from different sensory modalities relies partly on integration of different neural systems.

Keywords:

• limbic encephalitis
• emotion recognition
• facial and non-facial stimuli

Acknowledgments/disclosures

This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas, “Face perception and recognition”, by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, to MK (20161375). This study was also supported in part by a Showa University Grant-in-Aid for Innovative Collaborative Research Projects and by a Special Research Grant-in-Aid for Development of Characteristic Education from MEXT.