eficits in Facial Emotion Recognition in Patients with Epilepsy: Comprehensive Understanding from Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives

Facial emotion recognition is a key aspect of social cognition, crucial for social interactions. Recent studies have focused on deficits in facial emotion recognition among patients with epilepsy (PWE) and the factors influencing these deficits. Research suggests that brain damage caused by epilepsy may lead to specific impairments in recognizing emotions, with lateralization of epilepsy and the emotional intensity of stimuli playing important roles. Additionally, interactions between emotion type, emotional intensity, and the age of onset of epilepsy may contribute to these recognition deficits. Different treatments for epilepsy may have varying effects on facial emotion recognition. However, the precise mechanisms and the extent to which these epilepsy-related factors and stimulus variables contribute to these deficits remain unclear. To solve these problems, we introduced the effects of epilepsy type, lateralization, and age of onset on facial emotion recognition abilities, and explored the underlying mechanisms from a cognitive perspective. Future research should experimentally test these mechanisms, considering different ages of epilepsy onset and levels of emotional intensity. This would provide theoretical support for interventions aimed at mitigating emotion recognition deficits in PWE.