Matching Top–Bottom Parts of Facial Expressions by Brain-Damaged Patients

Abstract

Patients with focal brain-damage, right/left hemisphere-damage (RHD/LHD) and anterior/posterior region-damage (ARD/PRD), and normal controls (NC) were asked to match photographs of top–bottom facial parts expressing different emotions, positive (happy, surprise), negative–aroused (fear, anger), negative–nonaroused (sad, disgust). The LHD patients performed significantly worse than the RHD patients, and the ARD patients were significantly worse than the PRD patients, in the perceptual-matching task with affective stimuli. NC subjects performed significantly better than any of the brain damaged sub-groups.