FACE PROCESSING IMPAIRMENTS AFTER ENCEPHALITIS - AMYGDALA DAMAGE AND RECOGNITION OF FEAR

Face processing and facial emotion recognition were investigated in fi ve post-encephalitic people of average or above-average intelligence. Four of these people (JC, YW, RB and SE) had extensive damage in the r egion of the amygdala. A fifth postencephalitic person with predominan tly hippocampal damage and relative sparing of the amygdala (RS) parti cipated, allowing us to contrast the effects of temporal lobe damage i ncluding and excluding the amygdala region. The findings showed impair ed recognition of fear following bilateral temporal lobe damage when t his included the amygdala. For JC, this was part of a constellation of deficits on face processing tasks, with impaired recognition of sever al emotions. SE, YW and RB, however, showed relatively circumscribed d eficits. Although they all had some problems in recognizing or naming famous faces, and had poor memory for faces on the Warrington Recognit ion Memory Test, none showed a significant impairment on the Benton Te st of Facial Recognition, indicating relatively good perception of the face's physical structure. In a test of recognition of basic emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger), SE, YW and R B achieved normal levels of performance in comparison to our control g roup for all emotions except fear. Their results contrast with those o f RS, with relative sparing of the amygdala region and unimpaired reco gnition of emotion, pointing clearly toward the importance of the amyg dala in the recognition of fear. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Scienc e Ltd. All rights reserved.