AnalyzeDirect

Recent studies have shown that brain lesions to the prefrontal cortex may cause behavioral disturbances, such as dysfunctional emotional and social behavior. Lesions to this area can lead to severely negative psychosocial consequences: poor recognition of emotions, deficits in empathy and in the ability to understand thoughts and intentions of others.

Following this line of thinking, researchers from The University of Melbourne investigated the role of subcomponents of the prefrontal cortex in social cognition and emotion recognition. Twenty-seven patients who had undergone neurosurgery to the prefrontal cortex were divided into groups according to the location of the brain lesions. Lesion site and volume were ascertained by post-surgical structural MRI scans using Analyze software.

Experimental measures consisted of emotion recognition task and perspective taking task. During the former task, participants were presented with video clips showing a neutral face change into an emotional face and had to communicate which emotion they perceived.  The perspective taking test required the subject to read a series of vignettes and make inferences concerning the thoughts of the characters.

Results indicated that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex group was significantly impaired at identifying dynamic facial expression and showed poor performance when inferring about feelings. When considering the orbital and medial sectors of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex separately, the investigators demonstrated, for the first time, that the combination of both orbital and medial lesions was responsible for the impairments in social cognition in these patients. In fact, these regions are densely interconnected but have independent connections with different areas of the emotional system that would allow for compensation should either one become damaged in isolation.

Although future studies are needed to confirm the fundamental role of the combination of prefrontal cortex lesions, this study improves our understanding of the link between social behavior, subjective emotional experience and brain anatomy.

 

Tags: Brain Lesions, Social Cognition