A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage

  • Adolphs, Ralph
  • Gosselin, Frédéric
  • Buchanan, Tony W.
  • Tranel, Daniel
  • Schyns, Philippe
  • Damasio, Antonio R.
Publication date
January 2005
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Language
English

Abstract

Ten years ago, we reported that SM, a patient with rare bilateral amygdala damage, showed an intriguing impairment in her ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing information about facial emotions has been borne out by a number of lesion and functional imaging studies. Yet the mechanism by which amygdala damage compromises fear recognition has not been identified. Returning to patient SM, we now show that her impairment stems from an inability to make normal use of information from the eye region of faces when judging emotions, a defect we trace to a lack of spontaneous fixations on the eyes during free viewing of faces. Although SM fails to look normally at the eye region i...

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