Young A W, Hellawell D J, Van De Wal C, Johnson M
MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 1996 Jan;34(1):31-9. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(95)00062-3.
Facial expression processing impairments were studied in D.R., a 51-year-old woman with a partial bilateral amygdalotomy. D.R. was poor at recognising emotional facial expressions, both in static and moving stimuli. In identity matching tasks (same vs different person) and expression matching tasks (same vs different expression), D.R. was impaired at expression matching with simultaneously or successively presented faces; she experienced difficulties whenever the faces' identities were discrepant with their expressions. For identity matching, she also had problems when simultaneously presented images showed the same face with two different expressions; her deficit in interpreting facial expressions could lead her to mistake differences in expression for a difference in identity. In imagery tasks, D.R. was able to answer questions about the appearance of familiar people, yet she was very poor at imaging facial expressions of emotion. We suggest that her problems in processing facial expressions included impaired knowledge of the patterning of facial features in each emotion; without this, remembering or reconstructing what emotional facial expressions look like is as impaired as perceptual recognition. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis of a role for the amygdala in social behaviour.
对一名51岁接受部分双侧杏仁核切开术的女性D.R.进行了面部表情处理障碍的研究。D.R.在识别静态和动态刺激中的情感面部表情方面表现较差。在身份匹配任务（同一个人与不同的人）和表情匹配任务（相同表情与不同表情）中，D.R.在同时或相继呈现面孔的表情匹配方面存在障碍；每当面孔的身份与其表情不一致时，她就会遇到困难。对于身份匹配，当同时呈现的图像显示同一个面孔带有两种不同表情时，她也存在问题；她在解读面部表情方面的缺陷可能导致她将表情差异误认为身份差异。在想象任务中，D.R.能够回答关于熟悉的人的外貌的问题，但她在想象情感面部表情方面非常差。我们认为，她在处理面部表情方面的问题包括对每种情绪中面部特征模式的认识受损；没有这一点，记住或重构情感面部表情的样子与感知识别一样受损。这些发现与杏仁核在社会行为中起作用的假设一致。
