Frontal Lobe Mechanisms in the Judgment of Emotional Facial Expressions and Situations

Joy Granetz

The Hub, VIP 2
January 16, 2006, 07:00 PM to 07:00 PM

Abstract:

The frontal lobes have been implicated in the regulation of emotional behavior. This study was designed to explore the functional roles of the frontal lobes in formulating judgments about different situations depicting basic emotions. The performance of individuals with frontal lobe lesions on a battery of facial perception tasks was compared with the performance of matched normal controls. The results showed that the frontal patients performed significantly worse than matched healthy controls. Differences between the judgment of emotional situations across emotional categories (sad, happy, disgust, anger, fear, surprise) were found and poor judgment of emotional situations was associated with poor neurobehavioral functioning. Damage to the granular frontal region, (Brodmann area 9), the same area implicated in theory of mind processing, was found to be associated with poor judgment of emotional situations. The dorsal anterior cingulate was implicated in processing facial emotions, whereas the ventral anterior cingulate was found to be associated with processing of both non-emotional and emotional facial tasks. The findings are commensurate with findings from neuroimaging studies, and provide a good example of how the lesion method can complement neuroimaging data in neuropsychological research.