Emotion Elicitation With Neurological Patients

158 This chapter presents a set of issues and methods related to studying emotional functioning in neurological patients. It incorporates discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of two primary paradigms for studying neural substrates of human emotion (patient studies and activation studies); of the importance of studying multiple emotion processes, emotion types, and emotion response systems; and of the details of specific elicitation methods (along with modifications that may be necessary for use with patients). Throughout, there is a recounting of “lessons learned,” based on our own experience taking methods that we had developed and used over several decades for studying emotion in normal individuals and adapting them to study patients suffering from focal lesions (e.g., orbitofrontal lesions), congenital brain damage (e.g., Moebius syndrome), and neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).