Multimodal emotion perception in young and elderly patients with multiple sclerosis

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Clinical Neurology

Background:

• Multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with impaired emotion recognition and empathy.
• Previous research often focused on young patients and facial emotion recognition.
• This study addresses limitations by including age and multimodal emotion assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of MS and age on multimodal emotion recognition (facial and vocal).
• To assess socioemotional sensitivity in people with MS (pwMS) and healthy controls (HC) using self- and informant-reports.
• To explore the relationship between emotion recognition, socioemotional sensitivity, and cognitive function in pwMS.

Main Methods:

• Recruited young and elderly healthy controls (HC) and pwMS.
• Administered a neuropsychological battery and an emotion recognition task (facial and vocal).
• Assessed socioemotional sensitivity using the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (RSMS) via participant and informant reports.

Main Results:

• Both age and MS significantly impacted emotion recognition, with HC outperforming pwMS and younger participants outperforming older ones.
• Self-reported socioemotional sensitivity followed similar patterns, but informant reports did not corroborate decreased sensitivity in pwMS.
• Emotion recognition correlated with global cognitive severity, not socioemotional sensitivity.

Conclusions:

• PwMS exhibit deficits in multimodal emotion perception, extending to elderly populations without age-exacerbation.
• Self-reported socioemotional sensitivity in pwMS is not perceived by informants and is independent of emotion perception abilities.
• Further research is needed to understand the real-world implications of these emotion perception deficits in pwMS.