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Updated: Jun 1, 2026
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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Cognitively preserved MS patients demonstrate functional differences in processing neutral and emotional faces.
Margit Jehna1, Christian Langkammer, Mirja Wallner-Blazek
1Department of Neurology, Medical University of Graz, Auenbruggerplatz 22, 8036 Graz, Austria.
Brain Imaging and Behavior
|June 10, 2011
Summary
Multiple sclerosis patients show increased brain activity when recognizing emotions, even without cognitive or visual deficits. This suggests early adaptive changes in the brain
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Medical Imaging
Background:
- Emotional facial expression recognition is vital for social interaction.
- Previous research indicated emotion recognition deficits in multiple sclerosis (MS), often confounded by cognitive/visual impairments or depression.
- Early adaptive brain changes in MS are not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate potential early adaptive changes in brain activation during emotion recognition in mildly disabled MS patients using fMRI.
- To assess emotion recognition and cognitive function in MS patients compared to healthy controls (HC).
Main Methods:
- Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to compare brain activity in 15 MS patients (EDSS 2) and 15 HC during an emotion recognition task.
- Participants viewed neutral, scrambled, angry, disgusted, fearful faces, and houses.
- Behavioral (BERT, BRB-N, WCST) and clinical (BDI) assessments were performed.
Main Results:
- MS patients and HC showed no significant differences in cognitive performance or accuracy of emotion recognition.
- MS patients exhibited greater fMRI activation in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and precuneus for anger/disgust vs. neutral faces.
- MS patients also showed increased activation in occipital fusiform gyri and anterior CC for neutral faces vs. houses.
Conclusions:
- Mildly disabled MS patients demonstrate altered brain activation patterns during facial emotion processing, even without behavioral deficits.
- This suggests early, compensatory neural changes in MS patients.
- fMRI can detect these subtle adaptive changes in early-stage MS.
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