Emotion recognition and social cognition in temporal lobe epilepsy and the effect of epilepsy surgery

Emotion recognition in temporal lobe epilepsy: A systematic review

“…(b) Authors considered the correlations between facial ER performance and the age of epilepsy onset and/or duration of epilepsy (i.e. using Spearman rank-order correlations or Pearson's rank order correlations): fourteen studies used this analysis (Anderson et al, 2000;Adolphs et al, 2001;Meletti et al, 2003a;Reynders et al, 2005;Golouboff et al, 2008;Meletti et al, 2009;Palermo et al, 2010;Pinabiaux et al, 2013;Tanaka et al, 2013;Sedda et al, 2013;Amlerova et al, 2014;Benuzzi et al, 2014;Laurent et al, 2014;Wendling et al, 2015). Eight of these found a positive correlation between the age at onset of epilepsy and ER performance, supporting the hypothesis that earlier onset of temporal lobe seizures led to worse performances for recognition of facial expressions.…”

“…They found an improvement in fear ER in two right-side patients, after ATL. A prospective study in a large population of 30 TLE patients (Amlerova et al, 2014) demonstrated that no significant changes in ER abilities before and after ATL were observed. The limitation of this study was due to the inclusion of patients not seizure-free after ATL.…”

“…Only four longitudinal prospective studies were found including TLE patients that were evaluated before (1-3 months) and after (3-12 months) ATL (Sanz-Martin et al, 2006;Shaw et al, 2007;Benuzzi et al, 2014;Amlerova et al, 2014). One case report (Yamada et al, 2005) evaluated a patient's performance 4 weeks before and 2 weeks after epilepsy surgery.…”

Selective amygdalohippocampectomy versus standard temporal lobectomy in patients with mesiotemporal lobe epilepsy and unilateral hippocampal sclerosis: post-operative facial emotion recognition abilities

“…One particular problem to address this further is the fact that comparable cases with clearly defined conditions such as mesial temporal sclerosis and unilateral epileptogenesis without any further pathology enter our programme nowadays much less frequently than previously. Amlerova et al (2014) assessed data both longitudinally and according to a cross-sectional design. They did not find a clear group effect of TLE surgery on emotion recognition and social after having observed impairment preoperatively.…”

“…The anterior temporal cortex has been named a convergence zone of higher-order perceptual and emotional processes in this work. Amlerova et al (2014) recently reported on the impact of TLE surgery on emotion recognition and social cognition in a partly longitudinal and partly cross-sectional study. They described presurgical impairment and a rather neutral effect of surgery although few individuals showed a clear decline.…”