No impairment of recognition and experience of disgust in a patient with a right-hemispheric lesion of the insula and basal ganglia

An influential single case study (Calder, Keane, Manes, Antoun, & Young, 2000, Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1077-1078) recently showed a marked multimodal impairment in the recognition and experience of disgust in a patient with a left-hemispheric lesion of the basal ganglia and the insular cortex. Here, we investigated whether a similar deficit will be observed in a patient with a comparable lesion of the insula and basal ganglia in the right hemisphere. Remarkably, the patient showed no impairments in the recognition or experience of disgust and also no notable impairments in the recognition and experience of other emotions, across a range of stimuli, as compared to healthy comparison subjects. Thus, either deficits in disgust processing are not reliably observed in patients with lesion of the insula and basal ganglia regardless of the laterality of the lesion; or right-hemispheric lesions, in contrast to left-hemispheric lesions, do not seem to induce impairments in the processing of disgust.