The Neural Basis Special For Processing Disgust

Objective The selective deficit of recognition of disgust expression in Wilson and Huntington's disease suggested the possibility that basal ganglia is involved in emotion processing, especially in disgust processing. There is a hypothesis that insular- basal ganglia play an important role in disgust processing .To test this hypothesis and the hypothesis that different emotion has different neural basis., we test the perception of emotion in patient with stroke in basal ganglia and perception of emotion in patients with lesion in insular .Methods We developed six typical facial emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger) and a neutral facial emotion, six typical vocal emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger) and a neutral vocal. Labeling tasks with these emotional faces and vocal measured the ability to recognize emotion, especially disgust.Results Compared with normal controls, patients with stroke in basal ganglia impaired in perception of facial emotion (correct identification scores, 106.46±6.96, P <0.001), especially disgust and surprise (respectively, correct identification scores 9.29±3.22, 15.14±2.03; P<0.001, P <0.05). Score in disgust is worse than that in surprise (P <0.005). But normal in perception of disgust vocal (F=1.34, P>0.05), impaired in perception of angry vocal (correct identification scores, 11.94±2.42, p<0.05) and fear vocal (correct identification scores, 15.97±1.90, P <0.05). ZHL, with left insular lesions, manifested a robust deficit in recognition of disgust face and vocal emotion (the correct scores are 7,7, P < 0.001 in comparison with normal controls) sparing other emotions except fear express processing (barely borderline different from normal controls, P...