Study: Individuals with epilepsy have trouble interpreting facial expressions

Key takeaways:

• Adults with epilepsy had difficulty recognizing anger and fear.
• Further research is needed to determine effectiveness of the Emotion Recognition Task in those with epilepsy.

LOS ANGELES — Adults with epilepsy performed worse on a facial and emotional recognition test compared with healthy controls, with the largest disparity in recognizing anger and fear, according to a poster.

“The biggest knowledge gap is socio-emotional deficits among individuals who suffer from epilepsy,” Mary Ann Manley, BS, clinical researcher in the department of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine, told Healio at the American Epilepsy Society annual meeting. “We tried to pinpoint what some of those deficits may be and this is possibly a test that could be used to further specify those types of deficits.”

Prior research suggests that individuals with epilepsy demonstrate different nonverbal communication skills from healthy individuals. Manley and colleagues utilized the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT), a facial recognition test that is typically administered to healthy persons, and evaluated its ability to accurately assess functional deficits in those with epilepsy.

Their study included 67 adults, 50 with epilepsy and 17 healthy controls, with testing performed in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at Emory University Hospital.

The ERT is comprised of 96 separate computerized trials based around facial and expression recognition, in which faces morph from neutral expressions to any one of six specific emotions — happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust — whose emotion and intensity are randomly presented over the course of 16 different trials.

Evaluations were completed using both total ERT score (0 to 100) as well as a two-tailed t-test to compare the mean number of trials in which emotions were correctly identified between each group.

Overall, individuals with epilepsy performed poorer on the ERT than healthy controls, with average scores lower than their healthy counterparts.

The researchers identified a significant difference between those with epilepsy compared with healthy controls for identification of anger (P = 0.015) and fear (P = 0.04), although scores for the remaining four were not statistically significant.

Data from the t-test also show that the total mean number of trials correctly identified were 52.6% for those with epilepsy and 59.3% for healthy controls.

Manley and colleagues acknowledged that further research would be necessary to determine reasons behind these misidentifications, as well as to further determine feasibility of the ERT for this patient population.

“We’re still working towards more specific clinical applications,” Manley told Healio. “Epilepsy patients tend to do worse on this task, they have a more difficult time identifying these six facial expressions.”