Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, IA, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2021 Jan 27;288(1943):20202651. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2651.
The amygdala is a subcortical structure implicated in both the expression of conditioned fear and social fear recognition. Social fear recognition deficits following amygdala lesions are often interpreted as reflecting perceptual deficits, or the amygdala's role in coordinating responses to threats. But these explanations fail to capture why amygdala lesions impair both physiological and behavioural responses to multimodal fear cues and the ability to identify them. We hypothesized that social fear recognition deficits following amygdala damage reflect impaired conceptual understanding of fear. Supporting this prediction, we found specific impairments in the ability to predict others' fear (but not other emotions) from written scenarios following bilateral amygdala lesions. This finding is consistent with the suggestion that social fear recognition, much like social recognition of states like pain, relies on shared internal representations. Preserved judgements about the permissibility of causing others fear confirms suggestions that social emotion recognition and morality are dissociable.
杏仁核是一种与条件性恐惧表达和社会恐惧识别都有关的皮质下结构。杏仁核损伤后的社会恐惧识别缺陷通常被解释为反映了感知缺陷，或者杏仁核在协调对威胁的反应中的作用。但这些解释未能捕捉到为什么杏仁核损伤会损害对多模态恐惧线索的生理和行为反应，以及识别它们的能力。我们假设，杏仁核损伤后社会恐惧识别的缺陷反映了对恐惧的概念理解受损。支持这一预测，我们发现双侧杏仁核损伤后，从书面情景中预测他人恐惧（而不是其他情绪）的能力存在特定缺陷。这一发现与社会恐惧识别（类似于对疼痛等状态的社会识别）依赖于共享的内部表示的观点一致。对他人产生恐惧的可允许性的判断保持不变，证实了社会情感识别和道德是可分离的观点。
