Details on the face-sorting study with semantic dementia patients
Chapter 3 endnote 10, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:
...the patients [with semantic dementia] produced only positive, negative, and neutral piles, an arrangement that merely reflects pleasant versus unpleasant feeling.
We studied three patients with a relatively rare form of semantic dementia, a neurodegenerative disorder:
- EG, a 70-year old right-handed male
- FZ, a 64-year old right-handed male
- CP, a 53-year old right-handed female
All patients distinguished positive, negative and neutral faces. EG created three piles that he labeled “happy” (which contained all the smiling faces, one wide-eyed fear stereotype, and a few neutral faces), “rough” (which contained most of the negative faces and a couple of neutral faces), and “nothing" (which contained a few neutral faces and one wide-eyed fear face). FZ produced four piles which he labeled “happy” (all smiling faces), “sad” (most of the negative faces), “normal” (all the neutral faces) and a fourth pile that he variously called “sad,” “mad,” and “questioning” at different points throughout the study (which contained a random handful of assorted negative faces). CP also made four piles, which she labeled “funny/happy” (all the smiling faces and one wide-eyed face), “regular” (neutral faces) “not up” (assorted negative faces) and “really not up at all” (the rest of the negative faces).