The goal of this observational study is to learn about the emotional perception in people with ALS disease compared to people with other neuromuscular disease and healthy controls. The main questions it aims to answer are:

• How people with ALS judge happy and angry faces and what their "insight" into these judgements are like
• How their autonomic responses differ from the other two test group Participants will asked to judge if a face presents a happy emotion or angry emotion.

Researchers will compare the ALS group responses with neuromuscular diseases group and healthy control group responses to see if the ALS group judge more happy faces than angry.

Mild cognitive and behavioral changes occur in 35% of ALS patients and 10-15% of patients meet the criteria for FTD1-4. Recent research suggests changes in emotional perception and social cognition are a part of the neuropsychological changes in ALS, possibly associated with cognitive and behavioral symptoms seen in ALS-FTD5-9.

The aim of this project is to investigate emotional perception in ALS patients compared to healthy controls and patients with other neuromuscular diseases that do not affect the central nervous system. We use a simple emotion discrimination task to evaluate emotional bias and metacognition of emotion discrimination. Moreover, this project aims to explore the correlation between emotion perception and autonomic reactivity in ALS patients by recording heart rate frequency and respiration frequency during the EDT.

The project will contribute with deeper insights to the neuropsychological changes in ALS patients and the opportunity to quantify these changes. Thereby, the project will add new perspectives to the discussion of how we evaluate socio-emotional aspects of ALS in both clinical decision-making, guidance of relatives and future research.

Inclusion Criteria:

• ALS patients, ambulant and hospitalized

  • Able to give informed consent
  • Diagnosed with ALS or probable ALS according to the existing revision of the El Escorial Criteria 21,22.

• Patients with a peripheral neuromuscular disease, ambulant and hospitalized

  • Able to give informed consent
  • Diagnosed with a peripheral neuromuscular disease, that does not affect CNS, including but not limited to Myasthenia Gravis and polyneuropathy

• Healthy controls

  • Able to give informed consent
  • Age and gender matched to ALS patients

Exclusion Criteria:

• All Participants

  • Other severe medical, neurological, or psychiatric disorders
  • Visual impairment to an extent that interferes with the ability to perform of the test
  • Severe motor or cognitive deficits, to the extent that the test-task cannot be performed
  • Alcohol or drug abuse to an extent the interferes with task performance

• Patients with a peripheral neuromuscular disease

  ● Familial predisposition to ALS

• Healthy controls

  • Familial predisposition to ALS (first degree relatives)
  • Medical treatment that affects the central nervous system (e.g., antidepressants)

• Residents of Aarhus and Aalborg
• Patients at Aarhus University Hospital
• Patients at Aalborg University Hospital

All collected IPD. Once the data is fully anonymized, they may be released on public scientific repositories such as Github or Figshare.

After the anonymizing the data, which is set to happen after collecting the data from the last participant being tested, the data will become available. The data will be available for minimum of 3 years.

Through approval by Aarhus University Hospital or Region Midtjylland can individuals receive the collected data. The data can potentially be used as part of a masters thesis.