Undifferentiation of Somatic Responses to Emotions in a Case of Functional Amnesia

[摘要] The term functional amnesia (FA) has been proposed for cases of memory impairment presenting with severe retrograde amnesia in the absence of cerebral injury or history of psychiatric disturbance. Emotional flattening has often been reported alongside FA, however the mechanism of such a modification is unknown. This study aimed to explore the emotional processing in a rare case of a patient with FA complaining of severe emotional flattening.We presented ecological dynamic video stimuli conveying strong peaceful and fearful emotions to the patient and 13 controls. Wethen explored their emotional responses considering both conscious emotional judgements and automatic psychophysiologicalresponses (skin conductance) and facial muscular activity (corrugator supercilii). Both patient P.P. and controls perfectlyrecognized the emotions conveyed by the films. However, P.P. failed to showan increased skin conductance and corrugator activityas found in controls during fearful film extracts compared with peaceful extracts. Taken together, these finding demonstrate thepresence of an emotional deficit, characterized by a failure to generate appropriate somatic responses to positive and negativestimuli. Although this altered somatic processing did not interfere with PP’s explicit recognition of emotion, it modified hisemotional experience, thereby constituting a possible explanation for his emotional flattening. This study therefore suggests thatFA is not limited to a mnemonic impairment, but is a more complex disorder, involving also the processing of emotionally loadedexperiences.

[学科分类] 精神健康和精神病学