Lesion side matters - an fMRI study on the association between neural correlates of watching dynamic fearful faces and their evaluation in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.

Most studies assessing facial affect recognition in patients with TLE reported emotional disturbances in patients with TLE. Results from the few fMRI studies assessing neural correlates of affective face processing in patients with TLE are divergent. Some, but not all, found asymmetrical mesiotemporal activations, i.e., stronger activations within the hemisphere contralateral to seizure onset. Little is known about the association between neural correlates of affect processing and subjective evaluation of the stimuli presented. Therefore, we investigated the neural correlates of processing dynamic fearful faces in 37 patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE; 18 with left-sided TLE (lTLE), 19 with right-sided TLE (rTLE)) and 20 healthy subjects. We additionally assessed individual ratings of the fear intensity and arousal perception of the fMRI stimuli and correlated these data with the activations induced by the fearful face paradigm and activation lateralization within the mesiotemporal structures (in terms of individual lateralization indices, LIs). In healthy subjects, whole-brain analysis showed bilateral activations within a widespread network of mesial and lateral temporal, occipital, and frontal areas. The patient groups activated different parts of this network. In patients with lTLE, we found predominantly right-sided activations within the mesial and lateral temporal cortices and the superior frontal gyrus. In patients with rTLE, we observed bilateral activations in the posterior regions of the lateral temporal lobe and within the occipital cortex. Mesiotemporal region-of-interest analysis showed bilateral symmetric activations associated with watching fearful faces in healthy subjects. According to the region of interest and LI analyses, in the patients with lTLE, mesiotemporal activations were lateralized to the right hemisphere. In the patients with rTLE, we found left-sided mesiotemporal activations. In patients with lTLE, fear ratings were comparable to those of healthy subjects and were correlated with relatively stronger activations in the right compared to the left amygdala. Patients with rTLE showed significantly reduced fear ratings compared to healthy subjects, and we did not find associations with amygdala lateralization. Although we found stronger activations within the contralateral mesial temporal lobe in the majority of all patients, our results suggest that only in the event of left-sided mesiotemporal damage is the right mesial temporal lobe able to preserve intact facial fear recognition. In the event of right-sided mesiotemporal damage, fear recognition is disturbed. This underlines the hypothesis that the right amygdala is biologically predisposed to processing fear, and its function cannot be fully compensated in the event of right-sided mesiotemporal damage.