Specific Brain Damage and Emotions

1
Specific Brain Damage and Emotions
2
Right Hemisphere Lesions

• Lack of prosody (emotional coloring) in speech
  and inability to recognize emotional content in
  speech of others
• Poor performance on tests of social nuance and
  humor
• Other indications of impaired emotions such as
  being strangely unperturbed by a paralyzed leg
• Difficulty in recognizing emotions in facial
  expressions of others

3
Right Hemisphere Lesions

• These individuals can understand the emotional
  content in a verbal description of a situation
  such as The team lost at the buzzer when the
  ball bounced off the rim, but have trouble
  recognizing the emotional content in descriptions
  of facial expressions or gestures such as He
  shook his fist and was red in the face. He looked
  like he could kill

4
Temporal Lobe Damage

• Humorless and excessively moralistic religiosity
  and obsessive attention to trivial details if
  temporal lobe epilepsy results
• Mystical states of profound insight,
  spirituality, being touched by god or being
  filled with the spirit

5
Kluver Bucy Syndrome

• Damage to cortical temporal lobe structures such
  as visual association areas and subcortical
  structures such as the amygdala
• A profound placid emotional blunting becoming
  indifferent to people and objects.
• Must imitate others to perform the simplest of
  tasks such as eating with a knife and fork, cant
  remember people, objects or spatial relations
  among objects

6
Kluver Bucy Syndrome

• Hyperorality is prominent as everything and
  anything food or nonfood is placed in the mouth
  and possibly consumed
• Sexuality is enhanced with reports of homosexual
  interest and behaviors in previously heterosexual
  individuals and sexually indiscriminate actions

7
Damage to Prefrontal Cortex

• Loss of inhibition about behavior and its
  consequences, nymphomania?
• When presented with hypothetical moral dilemma
  scenarios, cannot verbalize common social and
  ethical principles
• Impaired or absent skin conductance response
  (SCR) to risky scenarios involving possibilities
  of small reward or sizeable penalties but SCR is
  normal for loud noises