Neural correlates of impaired emotional face recognition in cerebellar lesions

Abstract Clinical and neuroimaging data indicate a cerebellar contribution to emotional processing, which may account for affective-behavioral disturbances in patients with cerebellar lesions. We studied the neurophysiology of cerebellar involvement in recognition of emotional facial expression. Par...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain research 2015-07, Vol.1613, p.1-12
Main Authors: Adamaszek, Michael, Kirkby, Kenneth C, D׳Agata, Fedrico, Olbrich, Sebastian, Langner, Sönke, Steele, Christopher, Sehm, Bernhard, Busse, Stefan, Kessler, Christof, Hamm, Alfons
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aged
Cerebellum
Cerebellum - pathology
Cerebellum - physiopathology
Emotional facial expressions
Emotions - physiology
ERP
Evoked Potentials
Facial Expression
Facial Recognition - physiology
Female
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Neurology
Prefrontal cortex
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Summary:Abstract Clinical and neuroimaging data indicate a cerebellar contribution to emotional processing, which may account for affective-behavioral disturbances in patients with cerebellar lesions. We studied the neurophysiology of cerebellar involvement in recognition of emotional facial expression. Participants comprised eight patients with discrete ischemic cerebellar lesions and eight control patients without any cerebrovascular stroke. Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to measure responses to faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces Database (KDEF), interspersed in a stream of images with salient contents. Images of faces augmented N170 in both groups, but increased late positive potential (LPP) only in control patients without brain lesions. Dipole anaylsis revealed altered activation patterns for negative emotions in patients with cerebellar lesions, including activation of the left inferior prefrontal area to images of faces showing fear, contralateral to controls. Correlation analysis indicated that lesions of cerebellar area Crus I contribute to ERP deviations. Overall, our results implicate the cerebellum in integrating emotional information at different higher order stages, suggesting distinct cerebellar contributions to the proposed large-scale cerebral network of emotional face recognition.
ISSN:0006-8993
1872-6240
DOI:10.1016/j.brainres.2015.01.027