There is increasing interest in the understanding of emotion recognition deficits in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), the most common form of focal epilepsies. There are conflicting reports about impairments for different emotions in right and left temporal lobe epilepsy patients. A systematic review and a narrative synthesis was conducted for studies investigating emotion recognition (ER) in TLE. Embase, MEDLINE, PsychINFO and Pubmed were searched from 1990 to March 2015 and reference lists were reviewed. 996 citations were identified and 43 studies were finally included. ER deficits are consistently observed across studies. A fear recognition deficit is always reported, followed by deficits in sadness and disgust recognition. Deficits are observed across visual and auditory domains. Conflicting evidence is present concerning the severity of ER deficits in right and left TLE. Studies on anterior temporal lobectomy report data similar to that observed in pre-surgical patients. Current evidence supports the conclusion that recognition of negative emotions is commonly impaired in TLE, particularly for fear, and in the visual domain. Future work should focus on more ecologically valid test, on longitudinal studies to assess the role of anterior temporal lobectomy, and to correlate ER measures to social functioning in everyday life.
Keywords: Amygdala; Emotion recognition; Emotional prosody; Facial expression; Temporal lobe epilepsy; Temporal lobectomy.
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