Chapter 11 - Emotional agnosis and theory of mind

Summary

Imaging and lesion studies have identified cerebral networks associated with social cognitive functions which are frequently affected in patients with temporal or frontal lobe epilepsies. Processing of emotional information plays an important role in many aspects of cognition, including decision-making, memory, and attention. The perception and expression of emotional information and theory of mind (ToM) abilities have been investigated in numerous studies in a variety of patient groups and healthy persons using a number of experimental paradigms and tests. The chapter presents short descriptions and behavioral data from a variety of tests in order to reveal their differences and to highlight recent developments and research perspectives. Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) is the most prevalent focal epilepsy. Structure-function analyses have also shown an association between impairments in the recognition of facial expressions, especially of fear and reduced fMRI activity in patients with early onset right-sided TLE.