Human communication

1. Human communication Emotional communication Speech production and comprehension Reading and writing disorders

2. Expressing emotion • Are there innate mechanisms? • Darwin and cross-cultural evidence • Ekman & Friesen, 1971: New Guinea • Blind children (Izard, 1971) • Does learning affect expression? • Emotional display rules: America & Japan • Sympathetic expression • Social facilitation: Bowling

3. Neural basis of expression • Faking or acting facial emotion • Duchenne’s muscle/orbicularis oculi • Stanislavsky’s method acting • The social smile of recognition

4. Neural damage and emotional expression • Volitional facial paresis • Usually unilateral damage to primary motor cortex/connection to facial nerve motor neurons • No voluntary movement, normal expression • Emotional facial paresis • Usually unilateral damage to insular prefrontal cortex, frontal lobe white matter, or thalamus • Voluntary movement, no expression of emotion by same muscles

5. Volitional vs. emotional facial paresis Voluntary Expression Emotional Expression Volitional facial paresis Emotional facial paresis

6. Neural basis of expression • Right hemisphere/left face is more expressive • Chimerical faces • Wada test results • Right hemisphere damage impairs production and description of facial images of emotion. • Left hemisphere modulates emotional expression

7. Recognizing emotion • Recall the universals and social facilitation • Right hemisphere better at detection of emotional cues • Detecting strings of letters vs. facial expressions in tachistoscopic tests • Detecting verbal content vs. tone of voice

8. Effects of right hemisphere damage • Does not limit emotional judgments about hypothetical situations • Does impair emotional judgments about facial expressions and gestures • Limits ability to describe emotional components of imagined facial expressions of emotion. • Does not impair description of imagined non-emotional scenes.

9. Specific brain regions • Superior temporal cortex • Detects direction of gaze • Compares input from dorsal stream to parietal cortex: location in space. • Amygdala lesions impair recognition of visual facial cues of fear, but not happiness or auditory cues of fear • Human patients with bilateral amygdala lesions lost the ability to detect warning cues in pictures of faces.

10. Speech production and comprehension • Lateralization, damage, and the aphasias • Broca’s aphasia • Agrammatism • Anomia • Articulation difficulties • Cerebellar damage can cause agrammatism

11. Wernicke’s aphasia • Pure word deafness • Not visual agnosia • Transcortical sensory aphasia • Conduction aphasia • Damage to arcuate fasciculus • Anomic aphasia

12. Other aphasias • Transcortical motor aphasia • Prosodic disorders

13. Reading and writing disorders • Alexia with agraphia: Left angular gyrus • Pure alexia • Pure agraphia • The dyslexias • Acquired and developmental dyslexias • Word-form or spelling dyslexia • Phonological dyslexia • Surface dyslexia • Deep dyslexia • Direct dyslexia