Emotion recognition from dynamic emotional displays following anterior cingulotomy and anterior capsulotomy for chronic depression

Nathan Ridout*, Ronan E. O'Carroll, Barbara Dritschel, David Christmas, Muftah Eljamel, Keith Matthews

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Four patients that had received an anterior cingulotomy (ACING) and five patients that had received both an ACING and an anterior capsulotomy (ACAPS) as an intervention for chronic, treatment refractory depression were presented with a series of dynamic emotional stimuli and invited to identify the emotion portrayed. Their performance was compared with that of a group of non-surgically treated patients with major depression (n = 17) and with a group of matched, never-depressed controls (n = 22). At the time of testing, four of the nine neurosurgery patients had recovered from their depressive episode, whereas five remained depressed. Analysis of emotion recognition accuracy revealed no significant differences between depressed and non-depressed neurosurgically treated patients. Similarly, no significant differences were observed between the patients treated with ACING alone and those treated with both ACING and ACAPS. Comparison of the emotion recognition accuracy of the neurosurgically treated patients and the depressed and healthy control groups revealed that the surgically treated patients exhibited a general impairment in their recognition accuracy compared to healthy controls. Regression analysis revealed that participants' emotion recognition accuracy was predicted by the number of errors they made on the Stroop colour-naming task. It is plausible that the observed deficit in emotion recognition accuracy was a consequence of impaired attentional control, which may have been a result of the surgical lesions to the anterior cingulate cortex. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1735-1743
Number of pages9
JournalNeuropsychologia
Volume45
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Jan 2007

Bibliographical note

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Neuropsychologia. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Ridout, N, O'Carroll, RE, Dritschel, B, Christmas, D, Eljamel, M & Matthews, K, 'Emotion recognition from dynamic emotional displays following anterior cingulotomy and anterior capsulotomy for chronic depression' Neuropsychologia, vol. 45, no. 8 (2007) DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.12.022

Keywords

  • anterior cingulate
  • capsulotomy
  • cingulotomy
  • emotion
  • major depression
  • neurosurgery
  • prefrontal cortex

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