Orbitofrontal cortex lesions result in abnormal social judgements to emotional faces

• Published in: Neuropsychologia Vol. 48; no. 7; pp. 2182 - 2187
• Main Authors: Willis, Megan L., Palermo, Romina, Burke, Darren, McGrillen, Ky, Miller, Laurie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.06.2010; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Aged; Approachability; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Injuries - complications; Brain Injuries - pathology; Brain Mapping; Cognition Disorders - etiology; Emotion; Emotions; Facial Expression; Female; Humans; Judgment - physiology; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Orbitofrontal cortex; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Photic Stimulation - methods; Prefrontal Cortex - pathology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reaction Time - physiology; Reading; Recognition (Psychology) - physiology; Social decision-making; Social judgements; Social Perception; Statistics, Nonparametric; Young Adult; Social judgements; Orbitofrontal cortex; Social decision-making; Emotion; Facial expression; Approachability; Human; Affect affectivity; Nervous system diseases; Social perception; Decision making; Central nervous system; Emotion emotionality; Encephalon; Social cognition; Cerebral disorder; Central nervous system disease; Lesion; Face; Judgment
• ISSN: 0028-3932; 1873-3514
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.04.010

Facial expressions of emotion display a wealth of important social information that we use to guide our social judgements. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether patients with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) lesions exhibit an impaired ability to judge the approachability of emotional faces. Furthermore, we also intended to establish whether impaired approachability judgements provided to emotional faces emerged in the presence of preserved explicit facial expression recognition. Using non-parametric statistics, we found that patients with OFC lesions had a particular difficulty using negative facial expressions to guide approachability judgements, compared to healthy controls and patients with frontal lesions sparing the OFC. Importantly, this deficit arose in the absence of an explicit facial expression recognition deficit. In our sample of healthy controls, we also demonstrated that the capacity to recognise facial expressions was not significantly correlated with approachability judgements given to emotional faces. These results demonstrate that the integrity of the OFC is critical for the appropriate assessment of approachability from negatively valenced faces and this ability is functionally dissociable from the capacity to explicitly recognise facial expressions.