Mah Linda W Y, Arnold Miriam Courtney, Grafman Jordan
Cognitive Neuroscience Section, NINDS/NIH, Bldg. 10, Rm. 5C205, 10 Center Drive, MSC 1440, Bethesda, MD 20892-1440, USA.
J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2005 Winter;17(1):66-74. doi: 10.1176/jnp.17.1.66.
Patients with damage to the frontal lobes frequently exhibit impaired social behavior, but it is not clear which specific processes are disrupted. The authors investigated the ability to interpret nonverbal emotional expression in patients with lesions involving ventromedial (N=20) or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (N=9) and in healthy volunteers (N=23). As hypothesized, only patients with ventromedial prefrontal lesions showed impaired task performance relative to normal comparison subjects. These results suggest that deficits in social knowledge, namely difficulty interpreting nonverbal emotional expression, contribute to the aberrant social behavior observed following ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions.
额叶受损的患者常常表现出社交行为受损，但尚不清楚哪些具体过程受到了干扰。作者调查了涉及腹内侧（N = 20）或背外侧前额叶皮层（N = 9）的病变患者以及健康志愿者（N = 23）解读非言语情感表达的能力。正如所假设的那样，只有腹内侧前额叶病变的患者相对于正常对照受试者表现出任务表现受损。这些结果表明，社交知识的缺陷，即难以解读非言语情感表达，导致了腹内侧前额叶皮层病变后观察到的异常社交行为。
