Emotion recognition from faces and prosody following temporal lobectomy

The anteromedial temporal lobe has been found to participate in processing emotion, but there are unresolved discrepancies in the literature. To addre ss this issue, the authors investigated recognition of emotion from faces a nd from prosody in 26 participants with unilateral temporal lobectomy (15 l eft, 11 right) and in 50 brain-damaged controls. Participants with right, b ut not left, temporal lobectomy did significantly worse in recognizing fear from facial expressions. There were no group differences in recognizing em otional prosody. Neither IQ nor basic perceptual function accounted for tas k performance; however, there was a moderate negative correlation between e xtent of amygdala damage and overall performance. Consistent with some prio r studies, these findings support a role for the right anteromedial tempora l lobe (including amydala) in recognizing emotion from faces but caution in drawing conclusions from small group samples.