Effects of subcortical lesion site on human emotional behavior

This is the first quantitative group study of recognition, expression, and other social-emotional behaviors after third ventricle damage in humans. Hypothalamic damage often induced appetitive disorders without affecting other emotional functions. In contrast, lesions in several hemispheric sites, especially right medial temporal, impaired emotional recognition; frontal and basal ganglia damage impoverished facial emotional expressions, this deficit being dissociated from general facial-motor impairment. These functional dissociations indicate that social-emotional behavior is regulated by multiple neural circuits, many of which by-pass hypothalamic nuclei. This conclusion is shown to be consistent with (a) the considerable animal evidence linking appetitive-survival behaviors with hypothalamic activity and (b) the accumulating human data on the specific contributions of hemispheric cortical-subcortical systems in the regulation of emotional recognition and expression.