Processing of emotional facial expressions in Korsakoff's syndrome.

Full Abstract

Interpersonal contacts depend to a large extent on understanding emotional facial expressions of others. Several neurological conditions may affect proficiency in emotional expression recognition. It has been shown that chronic alcoholics are impaired in labelling emotional expressions. More specifically, they mislabel sad expressions, regarding them as more hostile. Surprisingly, there has been relatively little research on patients with Korsakoff's syndrome as a result of chronic alcohol abuse. The current study investigated 23 patients diagnosed with Korsakoff's syndrome compared to 23 matched control participants. This study is the first to make use of a newly developed sensitive paradigm to measure emotion recognition for several emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise). The results show that patients with Korsakoff's syndrome are impaired at recognizing angry, fearful and surprised facial emotional expressions. These deficits might be due to the reported sub-cortical brain dysfunction in Korsakoff's syndrome.

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Author information

Author/s: Montagne, Barbara (B); Kessels, Roy P C (RP); Wester, Arie J (AJ); de Haan, Edward H F (EH);

Affiliation: Psychological Laboratory, Helmholtz Instituut, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. B.Montagne(-atsign-)fss.uu.nl

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior (Cortex), published in Italy. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jul; vol 42 (issue 5) : pp 705-10

Dates: Created 2006/08/16; Completed 2006/09/20; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16909630, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Emotions
Facial Expression
Female
Humans

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