A woman who cannot recognize fear in people's faces is causing neuroscientists to rethink theories of how our brains read emotions. Scientists have been testing the 38-year-old woman for more than a decade. She has a rare disease that has damaged both sides of her amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain that is known from imaging studies to be involved in recognizing facial expressions.The woman, known as SM, finds it very difficult to tell from facial expressions when another person is afraid, although she has no problem recognizing other emotions, such as happiness, sadness and anger.Originally, researchers thought this meant that different emotions are processed by distinct neural circuits in the brain. But new studies with SM, published in this week's Nature, suggest quite a different explanation.Neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues showed SM photographs of various different facial expressions and asked her what emotion she thought the people were feeling.Researchers have done this many times before. But this time, to find the part of the faces on which SM was focusing, the team used a 'bubble test' in which only part of the face is revealed at a time.The researchers were intrigued to find that SM totally avoided looking at people's eyes. She discerned her information simply from looking around the nose and mouth.
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