In The Weeklies
British Medical Journal
08 January 2005
Risk of ischaemic stroke in people with migraine: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies by Etminan, Takkouche, Isorna, & Samii.
New England Journal of Medicine
06 January 2005
Neurologic and developmental disability at six years of age after extremely preterm birth by Marlow and colleagues. The issue also has editorial commentary on this research paper.
Limiting stroke-induced damage by targeting an acid channel by Benveniste & Dingledine.
06 January 2005
A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage by Adolphs and colleagues.
Ten years ago, we reported that SM, a patient with rare bilateral amygdala damage, showed an intriguing impairment in her ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing information about facial emotions has been borne out by a number of lesion and functional imaging studies. Yet the mechanism by which amygdala damage compromises fear recognition has not been identified. Returning to patient SM, we now show that her impairment stems from an inability to make normal use of information from the eye region of faces when judging emotions, a defect we trace to a lack of spontaneous fixations on the eyes during free viewing of faces. Although SM fails to look normally at the eye region in all facial expressions, her selective impairment in recognizing fear is explained by the fact that the eyes are the most important feature for identifying this emotion. Notably, SM's recognition of fearful faces became entirely normal when she was instructed explicitly to look at the eyes. This finding provides a mechanism to explain the amygdala's role in fear recognition, and points to new approaches for the possible rehabilitation of patients with defective emotion perception.