A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage
A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage
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DOI：
10.1038/nature03086
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发表时间：
2005-01-06
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Damasio, AR
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Adolphs, R;Gosselin, F;Damasio, AR
十年前，我们报道了一名罕见的双侧杏仁核损伤患者SM，她从面部表情中识别恐惧的能力出现了有趣的损伤（1）。从那时起，杏仁核在处理面部情绪信息方面的重要性已经被许多损伤（2-4）和功能成像研究（5，6）所证实。然而，杏仁核受损影响恐惧识别的机制还没有确定。回到患者SM，我们现在表明，她的损害源于无法正常使用信息的眼睛区域的面孔时，判断情绪，缺陷，我们追溯到缺乏自发的注视眼睛在自由观看的面孔。虽然SM在所有面部表情中都不能正常地注视眼睛区域，但她在识别恐惧方面的选择性障碍可以用眼睛是识别这种情绪的最重要特征这一事实来解释。值得注意的是，当SM被明确指示去看眼睛时，她对恐惧面孔的识别变得完全正常。这一发现为解释杏仁核在恐惧识别中的作用提供了一种机制，并为情感感知缺陷患者的康复提供了新的方法。
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(1). Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing information about facial emotions has been borne out by a number of lesion(2-4) and functional imaging studies(5,6). 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 in all facial expressions, her selective impairment in recognizing fear is explained by the fact that the eyes are the most important feature for identifying this emotion. Notably, SM's recognition of fearful faces became entirely normal when she was instructed explicitly to look at the eyes. This finding provides a mechanism to explain the amygdala's role in fear recognition, and points to new approaches for the possible rehabilitation of patients with defective emotion perception.