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The Recognition of Facial Emotions in Spinocerebellar Ataxia Patients

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Abstract

Patients with cerebellar lesions present some affective and cognitive disorders, defining a peculiar pattern of cognitive impairment, so-called cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome. This pattern has been confirmed in many genotypes of spinocerebellar ataxias (SCA), a group of genetically defined pathologies characterized by the degeneration of the cerebellum and its connections. Recently, in SCA patients, some authors focused the interest on social cognition evidencing an impairment of theory of mind and basic emotion recognition by verbal material. The recognition of emotions in faces is an essential component of social cognition; therefore, we assessed this ability in SCA patients, expanding the study from the basic verbal emotions to the basic and social visual emotion recognition. We assessed facial emotion recognition using two basic and social emotion tasks in a group of SCA patients together with a complete clinical and neuropsychological evaluation. We compared results with the performance of a control group. We demonstrated a significant difference between patients and controls both in basic and social emotion recognition, although we found a specific impairment only for social emotions. The deficit was not correlated to clinical and demographic features. The cognitive and psychological profile did not explain the impairment in emotion recognition. This result supports the hypothesis that the impairment in social emotion recognition could be specifically related to a defect in the corticocerebellar network.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Dr. Federica Avidano, Dr. Cristina Manzone and Dr. Chiara Caroppo for their contributions to this work. This research was supported by Compagnia di San Paolo, “Cervelletto e cognitività”, 2005–2006. The authors would also like to thank patients who participated in the study and their families.

Conflict of Interests

Authors declare no financial or personal conflict of interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroscience, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy

    Federico D’Agata, Paola Caroppo, Marcella Caglio, Michela Croce, Mauro Bergui, Paolo Mortara & Laura Orsi

  2. Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Via Cherasco, 15-10126, Turin, Italy

    Federico D’Agata, Paola Caroppo, Marcella Caglio, Michela Croce & Paolo Mortara

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Federico D’Agata, Marcella Caglio & Marco Tamietto

  4. Nuclear Medicine, AOU San Giovanni Battista, Turin, Italy

    Bruno Baudino

  5. Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Marco Tamietto

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  1. Federico D’Agata
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  2. Paola Caroppo
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  3. Bruno Baudino
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Correspondence to Federico D’Agata.

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Federico D’Agata and Paola Caroppo contributed equally to this work.

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D’Agata, F., Caroppo, P., Baudino, B. et al. The Recognition of Facial Emotions in Spinocerebellar Ataxia Patients. Cerebellum 10, 600–610 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-011-0276-z

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