Impairment of recognition of disgust in Chinese with Huntington's or Wilson's disease.

The selective involvement of the basal ganglia in recognition of the facial expression of disgust was investigated by examining a group of six symptomatic Huntington's disease patients and 32 Wilson's disease patients in China. Morphed photographs of facial expressions covering happiness-surprise-fear-sadness-disgust-anger were used and the patients were asked to label each photo. Other measures assessed basic cognitive functions and perception of non-emotion facial information, such as perception of gender, age, gaze direction, and recognition of unfamiliar as well as famous people. There was dissociation between the perception of emotions and other facial information, and between impairment of recognition of disgust and other emotions. The basal ganglia are the overlapping substrate involved in both Huntington's and Wilson's disease, although each has its own other lesions. The differentially severe impairment of recognition of disgust in the Chinese Huntington's disease and Wilson's disease patients strengthens the view that basal ganglia are selectively involved in processing the emotion of disgust.

Are there sub-types of attentional deficits in patients with persisting post-concussive symptoms? A cluster analytical study.

AIM: The present study aimed to examine attentional deficits in patients with persisting post-concussive symptoms using a multi-componential framework of attention. DESIGN: A cross-sectional investigation using standardized tests and questionnaires of attention including 92 patients. METHOD: Participants were administered comprehensive measures of attention assessing sustained attention (Sustained Attention Response to Task, Backward Digit Span), selective attention (Stroop Word-Colour Test, Colour Trails Test), divided attention (Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test, Symbol Digit Modalities Test), and attentional control (Tower of Hanoi, Six Elements Test). Ecological tests of attention were used to validate the cluster solution. MAIN OUTCOME: Three clusters of patients with different combinations of attentional deficits were identified. They were 'mild sustained attentional deficits', 'selective and divided attentional deficits', and 'general attentional deficit'. A MANOVA indicated that these three clusters were statistically and clinically different from one another in terms of different attentional components proposed. CONCLUSION: This study provides preliminary evidence suggesting that sub-types of attentional impairments exit in patients with post-concussive symptoms.

Reliability and validity of the Cantonese version of the Test of Everyday Attention among normal Hong Kong Chinese: a preliminary report.

OBJECTIVE: To validate the translated Cantonese version of an ecologically valid clinical test of attention - the Test of Everyday Attention (TEA). DESIGN: A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 49 healthy participants with a mean age of 25.9 years in the Hong Kong Chinese setting. OUTCOME MEASURES: These included the Color Trails Test, Stroop Colour-Word Test, Symbol Digit Modalities Test, Word Fluency Test, Design Fluency Test, Digits Backward Span Test and Modified Six Elements Test. In addition, the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire and Dysexecutive Questionnaires were also administered to the participants. RESULTS: The TEA was found to have a good range of test-retest reliability. The convergent validity of the instrument was established by correlation of the TEA with various measurements of attention, whereas the divergent validity was demonstrated by the insignificant correlation with tests of other cognitive functioning. Factor analysis of the TEA subtests replicated the major factor structure of the original version. CONCLUSION: The present study indicates that the translated TEA represents a culturally appropriate tool for measuring everyday life attention performance among the healthy Hong Kong Chinese.

Gender differences in neural correlates of recognition of happy and sad faces in humans assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

To examine the effect of gender on the volume and pattern of brain activation during the viewing of alternating sets of faces depicting happy or sad expressions, 24 volunteers, 12 men and 12 women, participated in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study. The experimental stimuli were 12 photographs of Japanese adults selected from Matsumoto and Ekman's Pictures of Facial Affect. Four of these pictures depicted happy facial emotions, four sad, and four neutral. Half of the photographs were of men and the other half were of women. Consistent with previous findings, distinct sets of neural correlates for processing happy and sad facial emotions were noted. Furthermore, it was observed that male and female subjects used a rather different set of neural correlates when processing faces showing either happy or sad expressions. This was more noticeable when they were processing faces portraying sad emotions than happy emotions. Our findings provide some preliminary support for the speculation that the two genders may be associated with different areas of brain activation during emotion recognition of happy or sad facial expressions. This suggests that the generalizability of findings in regard to neural correlates of facial emotion recognition should consider the gender of the subjects.

Talking while performing a task: a better attentional performance in patients with closed head injury?

This study explored the potentially beneficial effect of explicit verbalization on the attentional performance in patients with closed head injury (CHI) in both distracting and nondistracting environments. Ten patients with CHI and 10 normal controls were recruited. The findings indicated that in the absence of distractors, the two groups did not differ significantly on the total actual time of off-task behaviour. When distractors were present, the patients performed worse than their controls; whereas verbalization tended to reduce total actual time of off-task behaviour in patients more than normal controls (z=1.965, p=.049), the controls were at ceiling under the verbalization condition. Although the findings must be considered tentative because of this ceiling effect and the small sample sizes, our results do suggest that patients with CHI benefit more from self-instructional cues in a complex and distracting environment.

Impaired recognition of fear in a Chinese man with bilateral cingulate and unilateral amygdala damage.

LJM, a 41-year-old schizophrenic Chinese man with bilateral anterior cingulate gyrus (Brodmann's area 24) lesions and also a small lesion in right amygdala after an operation, was compared with normal as well as brain-damaged and schizophrenic controls in identification of morphed facial expressions of six basic emotions. In repeated administrations of the test for recognition of facial emotions, over a 1- year period, LJM performed significantly worse for expressions of fear compared with the three groups of controls. Recognition of other emotions was not significantly different from that of the controls, except that his recognition of disgust during the first session (but not in two subsequent sessions) was worse than normal and brain-damaged controls but not worse than schizophrenic controls. The dissociation between recognition of fear and other emotions supported the view that the brain has separable networks for processing different emotions, and that the right amygdala as well as the anterior part of bilateral cingulate gyrus are possible substrates involved in the special network for perception of fear. The results from the various groups of Chinese subjects indicate that they perceive emotions in a categorical manner, and that the six basic emotions are likely to be cross-cultural universals.