Emotional processing in RRMS patients: Dissociation between behavioural and neurophysiological response

Multiple sclerosis (MS) results in a broad range of symptoms, including motor, visual, cognitive, and neuropsychiatric deficits. Some studies, considering affective facial expressions to study emotion processing, demonstrated emotion recognition difficulties in MS patients.

We investigated the impact of MS on the emotional-behaviour rating and neurophysiological response (Event Related Potentials-ERP) through a battery of affective visual stimuli selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS).

Twenty patients with diagnosis of Relapsing Remitting MS (RRMS) and 20 Healthy Controls (HC) matched by age, gender and education were enrolled. Each of them, after a neuropsychological assessment, were asked to evaluate arousal and valence of affective visual stimuli.

Our results showed higher P300 amplitudes in RRMS patients than HC group for pleasant and unpleasant images. Moreover, RRMS patients showed lower Reaction Time (RT) respect HC in valence rating. No other effect did emerge between groups.

Our study shows early compensatory cerebral mechanisms in RRMS patients throughout emotional information processing, particularly for unpleasant and pleasant stimuli. We hypothesize that this compensatory cerebral mechanism reduces the behavioural dissimilarity between patients and HC.