Abstract
BackgroundFacial emotion recognition depends on cortical and subcortical networks. HIV infection of the central nervous system can damage these networks, leading to impaired facial emotion recognition.MethodsWe performed a cross-sectional single cohort study consecutively enrolling HIV + subjects during routine outpatient visits. Age, gender and education-matched HIV-negative healthy individuals were also selected. Subjects were submitted to a Facial Emotion Recognition Test, which assesses the ability to recognize six basic emotions (disgust, anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness). The score for each emotion and a global score (obtained by summing scores for each emotion) were analyzed. General cognitive status of patients was also assessed.ResultsA total of 49 HIV + and 20 HIV − subjects were enrolled. On the Facial Emotion Recognition Test, ANOVA revealed a significantly lower performance of HIV + subjects than healthy controls in recognizing fear. Moreover, fear facial emotion recognition was directly correlated with Immediate Recall of Rey Words. The lower the patients’ neurocognitive performance the less accurate they were in recognizing happiness. AIDS-defining events were negatively related to the correct recognition of happiness.ConclusionsFear recognition deficit in HIV + patients might be related to the impaired function of neural networks in the frontostriatal system. AIDS events, including non-neurological ones, may have a negative effect on this system. Inclusion of an emotion recognition test in the neuropsychological test battery could help clinicians during the long term management of HIV-infected patients, to better understand the cognitive mechanisms involved in the reduction of emotion recognition ability and the impact of this impairment on daily life.
Highlights
Facial emotion recognition depends on cortical and subcortical networks
Facial emotion recognition depends on a large number of different cortical and subcortical structures which participate in recognizing emotions shown on the face
To determine whether the fear recognition deficit was an expression of the cognitive deficit, we divided the HIV + group into two subgroups: Asymptomatic Neurocognitive Impairment (ANI) group and patients who showed no cognitive impairment
Summary
Facial emotion recognition depends on cortical and subcortical networks. Facial emotion recognition depends on a large number of different cortical and subcortical structures which participate in recognizing emotions shown on the face. When an emotionally meaningful stimulus is presented, information is first scanned along the occipital and temporal neocortex, where perceptual information is extracted from the face. After ≈ 100 ms, the stimulus is categorized as expressing an emotion or not, based on the structural properties of the image. The amygdala and orbitofrontal expression can be activated. This mechanism could contribute to generating knowledge about another person’s emotional state via the process of simulation, drawing on the somatosensory-related cortices in the right hemisphere to represent the emotional changes in the perceiver (see [1] for a review). Several studies have demonstrated disrupted facial emotion recognition abilities in patients with Parkinson’s disease [2,3,4], Huntington’s disease [5,6], and obsessive compulsive disorder [7], consistently with dysfunction of the frontostriatal pathway and amygdala [8,9]
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