Previous studies have shown inconsistent findings regarding the contribution of the different prefrontal regions in emotion recognition. Moreover, the hemispheric lateralization hypothesis posits that the right hemisphere is dominant for processing all emotions regardless of affective valence, whereas the valence specificity hypothesis posits that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing positive emotions while the right hemisphere is specialized for negative emotions. However, recent findings suggest that the evidence for such lateralization has been less consistent. In this study, we investigated emotion recognition of fear, surprise, happiness, sadness, disgust, and anger in 30 patients with focal prefrontal cortex lesions and 30 control subjects. We also examined the impact of lesion laterality on recognition of the six basic emotions. The results showed that compared to control subjects, the frontal subgroups were impaired in recognition of three negative basic emotions of fear, sadness, and anger – regardless of the lesion laterality. Therefore, our findings did not establish that each hemisphere is specialized for processing specific emotions. Moreover, the voxel-based lesion symptom mapping analysis showed that recognition of fear, sadness, and anger draws on a partially common bilaterally distributed prefrontal network.

中文翻译：

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限制性前额叶皮层损伤后面部情绪识别的基于体素的损伤研究

以前的研究表明，关于不同前额叶区域在情绪识别中的贡献的结果不一致。此外，半球偏侧化假说假设右半球在处理所有情绪时占主导地位，而不管情感效价如何，而效价特异性假说假设左半球专门处理积极情绪，而右半球专门处理消极情绪。然而，最近的研究结果表明，这种偏侧化的证据不太一致。在这项研究中，我们调查了 30 名局灶性前额叶皮层病变患者和 30 名对照受试者对恐惧、惊讶、快乐、悲伤、厌恶和愤怒的情绪识别。我们还检查了病变偏侧性对六种基本情绪识别的影响。结果表明，与对照组相比，额叶亚组在识别恐惧、悲伤和愤怒这三种负面基本情绪方面受损——无论病变的侧向性如何。因此，我们的研究结果并没有确定每个半球都专门处理特定的情绪。此外，基于体素的病变症状映射分析表明，恐惧、悲伤和愤怒的识别利用了部分常见的双边分布的前额叶网络。