ABSTRACT
Neuropsychological studies have shown that people with brain injuries involving the amygdala are often poor at recognizing facial expressions of fear. The importance of the amygdala for recognizing fear has also been demonstrated by functional imaging studies showing an amygdala response to fearful facial expressions. The neuropsychological findings often show differentially severe impairment of fear recognition after amygdala damage, but it is seldom only fear that is affected. In addition to facial expression recognition, the authors were particularly interested in whether N. M. was able to recognize emotional postures. For this purpose we used a set of photographs of a female and a male actor who were each asked to produce several different postures expressing happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger. To prevent the use of facial expressions, the actors' faces were masked. To assess recognition of emotional vocal expressions a set of emotional sounds was used.
