Emotion recognition from stimuli in different sensory modalities in post-encephalitic patients

Yayoi Hayakawa¹, Masaru Mimura², Hidetomo Murakami³, Mitsuru Kawamura³

¹Department of Radiology, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; ²Department of Neuropsychiatry, Showa University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan; ³Department of Neurology, Showa University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract: Emotion recognition from facial and non-facial stimuli was investigated in two post-encephalitic patients a few months after the onset of the disease. One patient who had a lesion relatively restricted to the amygdala and hippocampus experienced difficulty in recognizing fear from facial expressions. In contrast, the other patient who had a lesion that extended beyond the amygdala experienced difficulty in recognizing fear from non-facial (prosodic and written verbal) stimuli. We showed that impairment of emotion recognition was evident within a short duration after encephalitis and that recognizing emotion from different sensory modalities relies partly on integration of different neural systems.

Keywords: limbic encephalitis, emotion recognition, facial and non-facial stimuli