Review of Emotion Recognition in Stroke Patients

Abstract

Objective: Patients suffering from stroke have a diminished ability to recognize emotions. This paper presents a review of neuropsychological studies that investigated the basic emotion processing deficits involved in individuals with interhemispheric brain (right, left) damage and normal controls, including processing mode (perception) and communication channels (facial, prosodic-intonational, lexical-verbal). Methods: An electronic search was conducted using specific keywords for studies investigating emotion recognition in brain damage patients. The PubMed database was searched until March 2012 as well as citations and reference lists. 92 potential articles were identified. Results: The findings showed that deficits in emotion perception were more frequently observed in individuals with right brain damage than those with left brain damage when processing facial, prosodic and lexical emotional stimuli. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the right hemisphere has a unique contribution in emotional processing and provide support for the right hemisphere emotion hypothesis. Significance: This robust deficit in emotion recognition has clinical significance. The extent of emotion recognition deficit in brain damage patients appears to be correlated with a variety of interpersonal difficulties such as complaints of frustration in social relations, feelings of social discomfort, desire to connect with others, feelings of social disconnection and use of controlling behaviors.

Social information processing following resection of the insular cortex

“…A larger sample would be necessary to test for laterality effects in patients with insular damage more specifically, but these data suggest that the left insular injury may be associated with more severe impairments in social information processing. These results are discordant with the right-hemisphere hypothesis of emotion processing (Sedda et al, 2013;Yuvaraj et al, 2013), and with the results from a lesionmapping study involving over 100 patients, which showed that lesions in the right somatosensory-related cortices, including the insula, were associated with impaired recognition of emotions from human facial expressions (Adolphs et al, 2000). 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).…”

Hemispheric asymmetry non-linear analysis of EEG during emotional responses from idiopathic Parkinson’s disease patients

“…This finding indicate that stronger right than left-hemispheric degeneration in PD may lead to impairments in emotion recognition. This results are in line with Garrido-Vasquez (Garrido-Vásquez et al 2013;Ventura et al 2012), who reported that LPD had more difficulty with emotion processing since there is evidence that the processing of emotional information is righthemisphere dominant (Yuvaraj et al 2013). Furthermore, the right hemisphere is thought to be involved in social awareness and the in the recognition of salient social cues (Ventura et al 2012).…”

The overlapping relationship between emotion perception and theory of mind

“…To orient the reader, focussed literature on the neurology of EP has suggested a number of key themes, namely that EP as a whole may be right-lateralised (J. C. Borod, Bloom, Brickman, Nakhutina, & Curko, 2002;Yuvaraj, Murugappan, Norlinah, Sundaraj, & Khairiyah, 2013), or that it may be lateralised according to valence with the right hemisphere being responsible for the perception of negative emotions and the left hemisphere being important for perceiving positive emotions (Ahern & Schwartz, 1979;Davidson, Mednick, Moss, Saron, & Schaffer, 1987). Both the right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses have, however, been contested (Abbott, Wijeratne, Hughes, Perre, & Lindell, 2014).…”