Does Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Impair the Ability to Recognise Cues to the Emotional State of Others?
Abstract number :
J.11
Submission category :
Year :
2000
Submission ID :
376
Source :
www.aesnet.org
Presentation date :
12/2/2000 12:00:00 AM
Published date :
Dec 1, 2000, 06:00 AM
Authors :
Judith M Houghton, Paul Broks, Alan Wing, Paul Eldridge, Richard Walsh, Paul Davies, Rachael Jukes, Adam Kuczynski, Hazel Reynders, Birmingham Children's Hosp, Birmingham, United Kingdom; Royal Hallamshire Hosp, Sheffield, United Kingdom; Univ of Birmingh
RATIONALE: Recent research has suggested that the amygdala may become atrophied as a result of chronic temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). In addition, the amygdala has been implicated as a key structure within a proposed brain system involved in the perception of emotion in others and in social cognition. This paper reports the data from the completed first phase of a longitudinal study, focusing on the results of the assessment of emotion perception, social cognition and Quality of Life (QOL) pre-operatively in TLE sufferers who will be proceeding to surgery. METHODS: 17 left (L) TLE and 21 right (R) TLE patients were tested prior to surgery with a variety of measures to assess perception of emotion in faces and voices, social judgement and QOL. Duration of epilepsy was recorded for all 38 participants and MRI amygdala volumes were also available for 18 participants. RESULTS: The study found that the amygdala in the side affected by TLE was smaller than that in the non-affected side, using an MRI Index to assess lateralisation (p<0.05). The MRI Index was also found to correlate negatively with a number of measures, including Facial Expression perception (p<0.05), suggesting that the left amygdala may be particularly important for emotion perception. Interestingly some QOL scales had higher scores when the right amygdala was larger than the left (p<0.05). Duration of epilepsy was also found to be negatively correlated with some scores on the Facial Expression task, voice tasks (p<0.05) and a video task (p=0.057). 75% of LTLE patients had impaired scores on the Facial Expression task, compared with 43% of the RTLE group (p=0.052). CONCLUSIONS: Although it was not possible to establish a direct link between duration of epilepsy and amygdala volumes in this study, it did show that the volume tends to be smaller on the side affected by TLE. In addition, both amygdala volume and duration of epilepsy were found to influence performance on key measures of emotion perception and social judgement, with a particularly important role for the left amygdala. The right amygdala seemed to be important in relation to QOL measures.