Emotion Recognition in Benign Epilepsy of Childhood With Centro-Temporal Spikes (BECTS)

Facial Emotion Decoding in Benign Partial Epilepsy of Childhood With Centrotemporal Spikes

The social processes depend on complex cognitive mechanisms, which involve mainly the frontal and temporal lobe regions. Patients with early onset frontal and temporal lobe lesions might later develop important deficits in social integration. Accordingly, children with early onset temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) demonstrate altered emotion recognition.

Study design: Multicentre, Case-control study.

Emotion recognition is a first step for the development of the capacity to judge the thoughts, intentions, and desires of others. In infants, the capacity to identify, distinguish, and interpret emotions is limited, but these processes are developing rapidly and innately during the first years of life, on the same neural bases as those described in adulthood. Children with BECTS show altered social behavior. In fact, deficit in social cognition could derive from brain dysfunction in the frontotemporal regions primarily affected in BECTS, since these regions are also viewed as playing an important role in social cognition and development of social skills.

The investigators hypothesized that children with BECTS might have altered social cognitive skills and underlying neural networks.

Inclusion Criteria:

• children diagnosed with active BECTS (e.g. having at least one seizure with epileptiform abnormalities at EEG)
• treated or not with anti-epileptic drugs; age range between 6 and 11
• infants who have not presented an epileptic seizure within 48 hours before the psychodiagnostic evaluation
• patients with a sleep EEG recording; MMSPE (Mini Mental State Pediatric Examination) ≥23.3

Exclusion Criteria:

• mental retardation
• presence of other neurological or severe neuropsychiatric disorders
• atypical EEG pattern (awake or asleep)