Bilateral amygdala damage linked to impaired ability to predict others' fear but preserved moral judgements about causing others fear

Abstract

The amygdala is a subcortical structure implicated in both the expression of conditioned fear and social fear recognition. Social fear recognition deficits following amygdala lesions are often interpreted as reflecting perceptual deficits, or the amygdala's role in coordinating responses to threats. But these explanations fail to capture why amygdala lesions impair both physiological and behavioural responses to multimodal fear cues and the ability to identify them. We hypothesized that social fear recognition deficits following amygdala damage reflect impaired conceptual understanding of fear. Supporting this prediction, we found specific impairments in the ability to predict others' fear (but not other emotions) from written scenarios following bilateral amygdala lesions. This finding is consistent with the suggestion that social fear recognition, much like social recognition of states like pain, relies on shared internal representations. Preserved judgements about the permissibility of causing others fear confirms suggestions that social emotion recognition and morality are dissociable.