Preserved re-experience of discrete emotions: Amnesia and executive function

Like a rolling stone: Psychotherapy without (episodic) memory

People with profound amnesia still retain the capacity to learn about the emotional value of experiences, which is crucial in developing and sustaining interpersonal relationships. In a 2017 paper, we demonstrated for the first time (with patient JL) that transferential feelings develop across the therapeutic process, despite profound episodic memory impairment after medial temporal lesions. This paper reports a second case (GA) of a profoundly amnesic patient in psychotherapy, this time after lesions to the anterior fornix. The work with GA opens issues such as the differences and similarities to the previous case, counter-transference phenomena, and the effects of hyperphagia. The findings make it clear that many phenomena are common to both GA and JL, such as forgetfulness, various types of repetition, the importance of the therapeutic alliance, and the ability to make therapeutic gain. However, there were differences between the cases, for example as regards confabulation, which may relate to either pre-morbid personality or lesion site. The paper also discusses the way in which patients of this type bear the very status of psychotherapeutic work with profoundly amnesic patients. Where others have seen barriers and in principle problems in working with such patients, we see many opportunities.

Good things better? Reappraisal and discrete emotions in acquired brain injury

There has been substantial interest in emotion after acquired brain injury (ABI), but less attention paid to emotion regulation (ER). Research has focused primarily on the ER strategy of reappraisal for regulating negative emotions, without distinguishing between classes of emotion, and there has been no attempt at exploring these differences in patients with ABI. The present study explored components of reappraisal, across classes of emotion, and their associated neuropsychological mechanisms. Thirty-five patients with ABI and twenty-two matched healthy control participants (HCs) completed two questionnaires, a battery of cognitive tasks, and an emotion regulation task (the Affective Story Recall Reappraisal task). Results suggest that those with ABI take longer, and generate fewer reappraisals than HCs across several discrete emotions. Notably, their ability to decrease emotional intensity did not differ significantly to HCs for negative emotions, but findings suggest that their reappraisals are less effective when up-regulating neutral emotions to positive. Working memory was the only significant predictor of the total number of reappraisals generated, and the time taken to produce a first reappraisal. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of neuropsychological rehabilitation, including the role of the relatives in implementing and reinforcing micro-interventions.