Alterations of Activity in Visual Areas of Left Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Patients: Evidence from Moving Facial Emotional Tasks.

Background: Persons with epilepsy suffer from problems with social adaptation and face numerous social issues, even when the seizures are well-controlled. Facial emotion recognition (FER), one of the key components of social cognition, has been shown to be impaired in persons with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE).

Objective: To clarify the impairment of neural networks in persons with MTLE, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of MTLE persons using six dynamic tasks involving FER.

Methods: We evaluated brain responses to realistic dynamic facial emotional expressions involving six basic emotions (fear, happiness, anger, sadness, disgust and surprise) in nine persons with left MTLE and ten healthy controls (HCs) using fMRI.

Results: We noted brain responses to facial emotions in regions related to FER, such as the anterior insular cortex, medial frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus and cerebellum by our moving tasks which involved video tasks used to evaluate FER. Persons with left MTLE showed a reduced response in the right calcarine cortex compared to that of HCs.

Conclusions: This is the first study to evaluate task-related fMRI on exposure to six basic emotions involving moving tasks in persons with epilepsy. FER deficit in persons with left MTLE may be partially associated with calcarine activity.