Facial emotion impairment in multiple sclerosis is linked to modifying observation strategies of emotional faces

Emotional dyscontrol in multiple sclerosis: an opinion article

“…Indeed, in MS, emotional dyscontrol has been shown to be associated with difficulties in recognizing facial expressions, linked to the use of inappropriate eye-gaze strategies to decode facial emotions (Henry et al, 2009 , 2011 ; Krause et al, 2009 ; Banati et al, 2010 ; Berneiser et al, 2014 ). One study, investigating a cohort of 52 patients with different types of MS, found that 21% of them had developed significant facial emotion recognition impairments (Polet et al, 2023 ). These deficits appeared to be particularly pronounced for negative emotions, mainly fear and anger (Henry et al, 2009 , 2011 ; Berneiser et al, 2014 ; Pfaff et al, 2021 ), but also sadness (Krause et al, 2009 ; Berneiser et al, 2014 ; Pfaff et al, 2021 ) and disgust (Lin et al, 2021 ).…”

“…The difficulties in emotional dimensions do not appear to be influenced by the severity of physical disability or the duration of the disease (Pfaff et al, 2021 ). However, facial emotion recognition deficits have been shown to be more frequent and severe in progressive forms (Polet et al, 2023 ). In line with this evidence, a recent study has compared emotion recognition performance of patients with relapsing-remitting MS with that of individuals affected by secondary-progressive MS, suggesting that emotion recognition dysfunctions might be a sign of MS progression (Argento et al, 2022 ).…”

The neural substrates of social cognition deficits in newly diagnosed multiple sclerosis patients

“…Cognitive impairment has been well described in MS; however, assessment of SC deficits is still not part of MS routine clinical practice, despite evidence that they are frequent in MS. Previous studies demonstrated that MS patients showed a significantly lower performance, compared to healthy controls, in all subdomains of SC, 18–20 affecting patients independently from MS subtype, physical disability, and disease duration, 8,21–23 and that this impairment tends to be consistent over time 24 . It is also important to underline that, despite associations have been described between traditional cognitive domains and SC, 8,25–32 MS patients showed SC deficits even in the absence of traditional cognitive impairment, suggesting the potential independence of this domain 19,22,24,33 …”