Amygdalar lesions may impair emotion recognition in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy: Results from a pilot study

Deficits in basic emotion recognition have been documented in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Although numerous imaging studies have suggested a critical role for the importance of the amygdalae in emotion recognition, investigations comparing TLE patients with and without amygdalar pathology (AmyD) are lacking. The goal of the present study is to compare these subgroups of patients with TLE.

Twenty-five patients with TLE (12 with AmyD, 13 without amygdalar pathology (no AmyD)), and twenty-four healthy controls (CG) performed an animated morph task with faces showing basic emotions gradually changing in their emotional intensity. In an auditory task, subjects listened to neutral sentences spoken with varying emotional prosody.

AmyD patients showed significantly reduced prosody recognition and morph task performance compared to CG. Patients with AmyD showed worse prosody recognition performance compared to no AmyD.

In the present study, only TLE patients with amygdalar pathology showed deficits in visual and auditory emotion recognition. These results provide preliminary evidence for the importance of intact amygdalae in TLE for basic emotion processing in both modalities. The findings need to be confirmed in studies with larger samples.