Brain and Oculometric Markers of Emotional Facial Expression Recognition Deficits

Plain-language summary

Disorders in the recognition of emotional facial expressions are part of the social cognition disorders described in several diseases. They are notably present in a quasi-systematic way in diseases associated with socio-emotional behavior disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism. They are also found in some genetic syndromes with atypical neurodevelopment. In previous studies, the investigators adopted the FPVS-EEG approach to investigate facial emotion discrimination abilities in typical and atypical developing populations. the investigatorshave shown that, in typical adults, the neural response to facial expressions emerges as emotional intensity parametrically increases. A time-domain analysis revealed three components, with the first two increasing linearly with expressive intensity, and the third (beyond 300 ms) showing categorical sensitivity to increasing expressive intensity. The investigators have already successfully extended this approach to the investigation of patients, such as those with 22q11.2 syndrome. The brain response to facial expression was reduced by approximately 36% in these patients, revealing impaired visual coding of emotional facial signals. In this study, response amplitude was associated with positive symptom severity, indicating a potential endophenotype for psychosis risk. Here, the investigators study the implementation of high-level processes and the top-down effect it should have on the response of occipitotemporal regions to identify altered brain markers in schizophrenic patients, but also in other populations with expression recognition deficits (autistic, 22q11.2, in particular). The implementation of compensatory strategies that should result in an increased exploration of the lower part of the face at the oculometric level will also be studied.

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