Article

Concrete behaviour, the inability to disengage from immediate experience in order
to manipulate ideas and thoughts, has long been understood to be a common problem
after frontal lobe lesions. However, there has been little consideration of the
impact that concreteness may have on emotional functioning, specifically in the
use of thinking to manipulate emotional responses. One widely studied emotion
regulation strategy is reappraisal, which depends on several frontal lobe related
cognitive control processes. While there have been numerous neuroimaging findings
on reappraisal, no study has used brain injured patients to investigate this
issue. The present case study is the first to describe the capacity to generate
reappraisals in a patient (Mrs M), whose behaviour became concrete after a left
prefrontal stroke. Using a picture-based reappraisal paradigm, her performance
was compared to non-concrete brain-lesioned patients, and neurologically healthy
controls. Although Mrs M showed relatively preserved overall cognitive function,
she was completely unable to spontaneously generate reappraisals. In striking
contrast, once external support was offered, in the form of prompts, her capacity
to reappraise dramatically improved. The results are analysed in terms of three
neuropsychological capacities - all compromised in Mrs M - previously proposed as
reappraisal components: response inhibition, abstraction, and verbal fluency. A
number of implications for rehabilitation are discussed, including how the use of
prompting may facilitate reappraisal capacity.

Langue : ANGLAIS