Perception and Memory of Facial Affect following Brain Injury

Brain-lesioned patients and controls were shown a series of happy, sad, fearful, and angry faces and asked to identify verbally the facial emotion and later freely recall the affect when shown some of the faces having neutral expressions. Greater misperception of facial affect was associated with posterior lesions when bilateral lesions were removed from data analysis. Unilateral and bilateral frontal lesions, however, were associated with memory deficits for facial affect. As a group, right versus left hemisphere-lesioned patients were not different from each other in the perception or memory of facial affect. Right frontal lesions, however, seemed especially to disrupt recall of facial emotion.