Emotion recognition in patients with temporal and frontal lobe epilepsy and its relationship with perceived social functioning.

OBJECTIVE

The study examined emotion recognition (ER) across visual and auditory modalities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE), and explored associations with perceived social functioning (SF).

METHOD: Fifty patients (30 TLE, 20 FLE) and 50 healthy controls (HC) completed tasks assessing recognition of facial emotion and emotional prosody across seven emotions: neutral, happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. Patients also completed the Social Functioning subscale of the Quality of Life in Epilepsy Inventory-31 (QOLIE-31) and self-report questionnaires assessing affective symptoms.

RESULTS

Both TLE and FLE groups exhibited overall ER deficits across modalities compared to HC, with performance varying by emotion. TLE participants showed difficulties in recognizing fear and disgust across both modalities, whereas FLE participants were impaired in auditory recognition of these emotions and visual recognition of fear. Emotion differentiation impairments were relatively comparable across epilepsy types and modalities. Although groups did not differ in their relative performance across modalities, subsequent correlational analyses revealed a modest association between modalities in patients, but not controls. Within the patient group, the only significant association with perceived SF emerged for recognition of neutral prosodic features in the FLE group.

CONCLUSION

Individuals with TLE and FLE experience difficulties recognizing emotions from both facial expressions and vocal cues, especially those with negative valence. Limited associations between ER and perceived SF were observed only in FLE patients. The findings underscore the importance of assessing sociocognitive functioning in PWE.