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© 2004 American Academy of Neurology Brief Communications The autonomic and behavioral profile of emotional dysregulationFrom the Department of Neurology (Drs. Gorno-Tempini, Rankin, and Miller, J.D. Woolley), University of California, San Francisco; Department of Psychology (Dr. Levenson, K. Werner), University of California, Berkeley; and Human Interaction Laboratory (Dr. Ekman), University of California, San Francisco, CA. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. B.L. Miller, Department of Neurology, University of California San Francisco, 350 Parnassus Street, Suite 706, San Francisco, CA 94143-1207; e-mail: bmiller{at}memory.ucsf.edu The authors describe a patient with focal brain atrophy and emotional lability characterized by episodes of excessive crying and laughing. The patient was selectively impaired in the production of voluntary complex facial movements and was unable to regulate her emotional behavior and autonomic reactivity. She also displayed increased behavioral and autonomic changes when explicitly trying to suppress her responses to emotional stimuli (compared with when not trying to regulate her responses). This pattern of deficits supports a selective deficit in voluntary emotional control.
Received January 13, 2004. Accepted in final form July 1, 2004. Additional material related to this article can be found on the Neurology Web site. Go to www.neurology.org and scroll down the Table of Contents for the November 9 issue to find the link for this article. *These authors contributed equally to this work. This article has been cited by other articles:
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