Are You Upset? Distinct Roles for Orbitofrontal and Lateral Prefrontal Cortex in Detecting and Distinguishing Facial Expressions of Emotion
Cerebral Cortex. 2012-01-05; 22(12): 2904-2912
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr370
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1. Cereb Cortex. 2012 Dec;22(12):2904-12. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhr370. Epub 2012
Jan 5.
Are you upset? Distinct roles for orbitofrontal and lateral prefrontal cortex in
detecting and distinguishing facial expressions of emotion.
Tsuchida A(1), Fellows LK.
Author information:
(1)Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery, Montreal Neurological Institute,
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2B4, Canada.
Navigating our complex social world requires effective processing of subtle
emotional signals, such as those conveyed by facial expressions. Failure to do
so may underlie some of the disabling social-emotional deficits common in a
range of neuropsychiatric and neurological conditions. Prefrontal cortex (PFC)
has long been implicated in these processes, but the particular contributions of
subregions within PFC remain unclear. We used a sensitive facial emotion rating
task in patients with focal lesions to different regions within PFC to identify
distinct contributions of 2 prefrontal regions to recognizing emotions from
facial expressions. A combination of region-of-interest and voxel-based
lesion-symptom mapping established that damage to ventromedial PFC impaired the
detection of subtle facial expressions of emotion. Such patients had difficulty
distinguishing emotional from neutral expressions. In contrast, patients with
left ventrolateral PFC were able to detect the presence of emotional signals but
had difficulty discriminating between specific emotions. These effects were
regionally specific: Dorsomedial prefrontal damage had no effect on either
aspect of emotion recognition. These findings suggest that separable processes
relying critically on distinct regions within PFC responsible, on the one hand,
for detecting emotional signals from facial expressions and, on the other, for
correctly classifying such signals.