Cognitive science: Staring fear in the face

The unusual case of SM, a person who has a very specific deficit in recognizing fearful expressions on people's faces, is providing intriguing insights into how we perceive emotion.The look of fearWe continuously look at people's faces to judge how they feel: happy, sad, angry or afraid? A region of the brain called the amygdala is needed to make such judgements, and a new study shows how. A rare subject with bilateral amygdala damage was impaired in her ability to make use of information from the eye region in the face. This resulted in a severe impairment in her ability to recognize fear. Strikingly, when she was instructed to look at other people's eyes, her recognition of fear became normal. This suggests that our brains actively seek out important social cues in the environment, and that impairments in this mechanism in diseases such as autism might be overcome by instructing patients to change the way they look at the world.