Journal Article

Discrete Neural Correlates for the Recognition of Negative Emotions: Insights from Frontotemporal Dementia

Piguet, Olivier, Hodges, John R., Irish, Muireann, Kumfor, Fiona

2013

Overview

Patients with frontotemporal dementia have pervasive changes in emotion recognition and social cognition, yet the neural changes underlying these emotion processing deficits remain unclear. The multimodal system model of emotion proposes that basic emotions are dependent on distinct brain regions, which undergo significant pathological changes in frontotemporal dementia. As such, this syndrome may provide important insight into the impact of neural network degeneration upon the innate ability to recognise emotions. This study used voxel-based morphometry to identify discrete neural correlates involved in the recognition of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and happiness) in frontotemporal dementia. Forty frontotemporal dementia patients (18 behavioural-variant, 11 semantic dementia, 11 progressive nonfluent aphasia) and 27 healthy controls were tested on two facial emotion recognition tasks: The Ekman 60 and Ekman Caricatures. Although each frontotemporal dementia group showed impaired recognition of negative emotions, distinct associations between emotion-specific task performance and changes in grey matter intensity emerged. Fear recognition was associated with the right amygdala; disgust recognition with the left insula; anger recognition with the left middle and superior temporal gyrus; and sadness recognition with the left subcallosal cingulate, indicating that discrete neural substrates are necessary for emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia. The erosion of emotion-specific neural networks in neurodegenerative disorders may produce distinct profiles of performance that are relevant to understanding the neurobiological basis of emotion processing.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Aged / Amygdala / Anger / Animal cognition / Aphasia / Artificial neural networks / Behavior / Biology / Brain / Brain - diagnostic imaging / Brain Mapping / Brain research / Case-Control Studies / Change detection / Cognition / Degeneration / Dementia / Dementia disorders / Emotion recognition / Emotions / Erosion / Face recognition / Facial Expression / Fear / Female / Frontotemporal dementia / Frontotemporal Dementia - diagnostic imaging / Frontotemporal Dementia - pathology / Happiness / Humans / Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Male / Medicine / Middle Aged / Morphometry / Nervous system diseases / Neural networks / Neurodegeneration / Neurodegenerative diseases / Neuropsychological Tests / Neuropsychology / Neurosciences / Patients / Pattern recognition / Physiological aspects / Recognition (Psychology) / Semantic dementia / Social and Behavioral Sciences / Social interactions / Studies / Substantia grisea / Substrates / Superior temporal gyrus / Temporal gyrus