No impairment of recognition and experience of disgust in a patient with a right-hemispheric lesion of the insula and basal ganglia

Social information processing following resection of the insular cortex

“…Nevertheless, a more recent, large voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping found that only the left insula was significantly involved in facial emotion recognition impairment following penetrating brain injury (Dal Monte et al, 2013). A left insular role in emotion recognition may account for the divergent results provided by two case reports of similar insular damage, one finding impaired disgust recognition after left hemisphere stroke (Calder et al, 2000), and the other one finding no emotion recognition impairment following right hemisphere stroke (Straube et al, 2010). Cohn et al (2014) recently reported poorer social inference abilities after left vs. right anterior temporal lobectomy, suggesting that this lateralizing effect, if present, may also apply to other structures involved in emotion recognition as well.…”

“…Impaired recognition of facial expressions of disgust, along with emotional disturbance, has also been later reported in another rare patient with an ischemic lesion involving the left posterior insula (Borg et al, 2013). However, others have reported no such impairment following isolated insular injury (Straube et al, 2010). Furthermore, the specificity of the insula for processing disgust has been questioned by several studies which suggested an involvement in processing other emotions as well (e.g., Britton et al, 2006;Dal Monte et al, 2013;Schienle et al, 2002).…”

Attention to aversive emotion and specific activation of the right insula and right somatosensory cortex

“…However, it should be noted that lesions of the right insula and right somatosensory areas seem to induce rather subtle impairments in emotional tasks and experiences (Adolphs et al, 2000(Adolphs et al, , 2003Straube et al, 2010b). Thus, it is rather unlikely that emotional experiences are simply based on activation in insular and somatosensory areas.…”

“…In the parametric analysis, we modeled a linear increase of activation to threat vs. neutral pictures depending on the tasks [balanced contrast values (threat, neutral) for Level-1, Level-2, Level-3, Level-4: −4 1, −2 1, 2 −1, 4 −1]. Activation was analyzed in regions of interest (ROI) according to our previous studies (e.g., Straube et al, 2004Straube et al, , 2006Straube et al, , 2007Straube et al, , 2008Straube et al, , 2009bStraube et al, , 2010bQuadflieg et al, 2008;Schmidt et al, 2010). The following ROIs were defined a priori using Talairach daemon software (Lancaster et al, 2000): dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), anterior insula, ACC, amygdala, posterior insula/secondary somatosensory cortex (posterior insula/ S2), and primary somatosensory cortex (S1).…”

Integration of Intention and Outcome for Moral Judgment in Frontotemporal Dementia: Brain Structural Signatures

“…This methodology allows comparisons between the scores of each bvFTD patient and those of the control group [38,39]. This modified test is more robust for nonnormal distributions, generates few type I errors [40], and has been employed in recent single-case studies [41,42,43]. Additionally, several reports [41,44,45,46,47] have relied on this method to compare a number of measures and experimental variables of single cases with a control sample, which shows that it is a widely used strategy in the current neuropsychological literature.…”