Emotional experience in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients

Defective social abilities have been observed in patients with Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Hippocampal Sclerosis (MTLE), particularly in facial expression recognition of negative emotions1-3. The aim of this study was to test the existence of a supramodal system for recognizing signals of fundamental emotions and whether these abilities are linked to the experience of the same emotions. A group of MTLE patients has performed two different tasks: 1) emotions recognition from facial expressions and prosody of five basic emotions (happiness, fear, disgust, anger and sadness); 2) evaluation of subjective experience of emotions of fear, anger and disgust. The results show a significant correlation between facial emotion and emotional prosody recognition tasks, whereas no correlation was found between subjective measures of fear, anger, disgust and the recognition of these emotions in the visual and auditory domain. These preliminary data suggest the existence of a supramodal system for recognizing fundamental emotions and that the neuronal systems involved in the recognition of the visual and prosodic expression of emotion may not be necessary for the subjective experience.