Bimodal emotional recognition with auditory and visual stimuli in Argentinian patients with resistant temporal lobe epilepsy

FERNÁNDEZ LIMA, MÓNICA; GIAGANTE, BRENDA; ODDO, SILVIA; D'ALESSIO, LUCIANA; SCÉVOLA, LAURA; KOCHEN, SILVIA

San José

Congreso; X Congreso Latinoamericano de Epilepsia (LACE); 2018

International league against epilepsy (ILAE) - International Bureau for Epilepsy (IBE)

Introduction and objective: Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most common form of epilepsy. The hippocampus-amygdala complex, along with others structures of the limbic system, plays a central role in emotional recognition (ER) and this function plays an essential role in social cognition and behavior. The aim of this study was to determine the performance in ER in patients with drug-resistant TLE (RTLE) using visual and auditory stimuli tests. Methods: Patients with RTLE were diagnosed according to the following protocol: neurological, neuropsychological, and psychiatric evaluations; EEG, VEEG and MRI studies. Healthy controls were matched according to age and gender. The ER ability was tested using visual stimuli from the Set "Pictures of facial affect? (POFA) from Ekman and Friesen (1976)-(Image 1) and auditory stimuli from the Set "Montreal Affective Voices" (Belin, Fillon-Bilodeau and Gosselin, 2008). In both cases, the emotional categories of the stimuli sets were seven: Happiness, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Surprise and Neutral. Statistical analysis performed: normality test, Student´s test and Mann-Whitney. Results: We included 103 subjects: 80 patients with RTLE and 23 healthy controls with a similar sociodemographic background (Table 1). All subjects performed the visual test and regarding the auditory test, all controls and 49 patients performed it due to its later implementation. RTLE patients presented a lower performance in all the emotional categories in both tests, with a significant difference in the following categories: Visual test  Happiness, fear, sadness and surprise (Graphic 1). Auditory test  Anger, surprise and neutral (Graphic 2). Happiness was the best recognize emotion in both tests and also for both groups. Negative valence emotions were the worst recognize emotions in the visual test (by both groups), fear specially; and regarding the auditory test, the worst recognize emotion was surprise (also by both groups). Additionally, RTLE group had a worst general (or average) performance in both tests (p