Global affective memory for faces in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

Eighteen (9 left, 9 right) epileptic patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and 20 control participants were evaluated. Participants were instructed to make global affective judgments of likeability in a face memory task or to make neutral piecemeal judgments of nose size during the encoding phase of the task. A main effect of better memory after using a global affective versus a neutral piecemeal encoding strategy was found. Patients with right sided abnormality performed more poorly in the global affective encoding condition than patients with left-sided abnormality or than the control participants. No differences were seen among groups for the neutral piecemeal condition. Further, unlike the left TLE patients and the control participants, the right TLE patients did not show better performance when using the global affective encoding strategy over the neutral piecemeal strategy. This is discussed in relation to the literature suggesting an important role for the right hemisphere in global affective processing and memory, as well as the literature indicating an important role for the amygdala in affective memory.