A growing literature points to a specific role of the cerebellum in affect processing. However, understanding of affect processing disturbances following discrete cerebellar lesions is limited. We administered the Tübingen Affect Battery to assess recognition of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody in 15 patients with a cerebellar infarction and 10 age-matched controls. On emotional facial expression tasks, patients compared to controls showed impaired selection and matching of facial affect. On prosody tasks, patients showed marked impairments in naming affect and discriminating incongruencies. These deficits were more pronounced for negative affects. Our results confirm a significant role of the cerebellum in processing emotional recognition, a component of social cognition. © Springer Science+Business Media 2013.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	cerebellum, emotional recognition, facial expression, prosody, social cognition
Research Division:	Biomedical and Clinical Sciences
Research Group:	Neurosciences
Research Field:	Neurosciences not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Health
Objective Group:	Public health (excl. specific population health)
Objective Field:	Behaviour and health
UTAS Author:	Kirkby, KC (Professor Kenneth Kirkby)
ID Code:	96819
Year Published:	2014
Web of Science® Times Cited:	52
Deposited By:	Health Sciences B
Deposited On:	2014-11-21
Last Modified:	2017-11-07
Downloads:	0