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Few studies have examined the specific contribution of focal damage of the prefrontal cortex and executive dysfunction to emotion recognition deficits, with results reporting controversial findings. This study investigated the performance of 30 patients with prefrontal cortex damage and 30 matched controls on a battery of executive measures assessing processes of inhibition, flexibility, and planning and a task of emotion recognition with also a particular attention to the examination of the association between these domains. The results showed that compared with control participants, patients with prefrontal cortex damage were impaired in recognizing the three negative emotions of fear, sadness, and anger and were also impaired on all executive measures. Moreover, by examining the association between both these domains, using correlation and regression analyses, we noted that impaired performance in recognizing emotions of fear, sadness, and anger was predicted by impaired performances on the measures of inhibition and flexibility or "set-shifting" suggesting that the ability to recognize emotions could be at least to some extent cognitively mediated. Finally, using a voxel-based lesion technique, we identified a partially common prefrontal network underlying deficits on executive functions and emotions recognition centered on the ventral and medial parts of the prefrontal cortex, reflecting beyond the neural network involved in recognizing negative emotions per se that of the cognitive processes elicited by this emotion task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Patients with prefrontal cortex damage often transgress social rules and show lower accuracy in identifying and explaining inappropriate social behavior. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between the ability to perceive other unintentional transgressions of social norms and both decision making and emotion recognition as these abilities are critical for appropriate social behavior. Method We examined a group of patients with focal prefrontal cortex damage (N  = 28) and a group of matched control participants (N  = 28) for their abilities to detect unintentional transgression of social norms using the "Faux-Pas" task of theory of mind, to make advantageous decisions on the Iowa gambling task, and to recognize basic emotions on the Ekman facial affect test. Results The group of patients with frontal lobe damage was impaired in all of these tasks compared with control participants. Moreover, all the "Faux-Pas", Iowa gambling, and emotion recognition tasks were significantly associated and predicted by executive measures of inhibition, flexibility, or planning. However, only measures from the Iowa gambling task were associated and predicted performance on the "Faux-Pas" task. These tasks were not associated with performance in recognition of basic emotions. These findings suggest that theory of mind, executive functions, and decision-making abilities act in an interdependent way for appropriate social behavior. However, theory of mind and emotion recognition seem to have distinct but additive effects upon social behavior. Results from VLSM analysis also corroborate these data by showing a partially overlapped prefrontal circuitry underlying these cognitive domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]