Impaired Perception of Emotional Expression in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
OBJECTIVE
The increasing recognition that deficits in social emotions occur in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is helping to explain the spectrum of neuropsychological dysfunctions, thus supporting the view of ALS as a multisystem disorder involving neuropsychological deficits as well as motor deficits. The aim of this study was to characterize the emotion perception abilities of Korean patients with ALS based on the recognition of facial expressions.


METHODS
Twenty-four patients with ALS and 24 age- and sex-matched healthy controls completed neuropsychological tests and facial emotion recognition tasks [ChaeLee Korean Facial Expressions of Emotions (ChaeLee-E)]. The ChaeLee-E test includes facial expressions for seven emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and neutral.


RESULTS
The ability to perceive facial emotions was significantly worse among ALS patients performed than among healthy controls [65.2±18.0% vs. 77.1±6.6% (mean±SD), p=0.009]. Eight of the 24 patients (33%) scored below the 5th percentile score of controls for recognizing facial emotions.


CONCLUSIONS
Emotion perception deficits occur in Korean ALS patients, particularly regarding facial expressions of emotion. These findings expand the spectrum of cognitive and behavioral dysfunction associated with ALS into emotion processing dysfunction.
Department of Neurology, Busan Paik Hospital, Inje University College of Medicine, Busan, Korea.
Seong Il
SI
Oh
Department of Neurology, College of Medicine, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Ki Wook
KW
Oh
Department of Neurology, College of Medicine, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Hee Jin
HJ
Kim
Department of Neurology, College of Medicine, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
Jin Seok
JS
Park
Department of Neurology, College of Medicine, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. kimsh1@hanyang.ac.kr.
Seung Hyun
SH
Kim
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; emotion; emotion perception; facial expression; frontotemporal dementia