How does visual context influence recognition of facial emotion in people with traumatic brain injury?

Objective: The current study assessed recognition of facial emotional stimuli following traumatic brain injury (TBI) and examined whether performance may be influenced by emotional visual scenes.Methods: Thirty-five patients with moderate-to-severe TBI and 55 matched controls completed the novel Angers Facial Expression in Context Task (AFECT), designed to examine recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions in both congruent and incongruent emotional visual contexts.Results: In comparison with non-brain damaged adults, patients with TBI performed more poorly and slowly on both contextual conditions (congruent vs. incongruent) of the AFECT.Conclusion: Taken together, these results raise the possibility that adults with TBI may not fully benefit from supportive contextual cues. Also, they stress the importance of using emotional stimuli that better capture affect processing in real-world contexts and open up new avenues to better understand negative social outcomes in patients with TBI.

Absent CNKSR2 causes seizures and intellectual, attention, and language deficits.

Synaptic function is central to brain function. Understanding the synapse is aided by studies of patients lacking individual synaptic proteins. Common neurological diseases are genetically complex. Their understanding is likewise simplified by studies of less common monogenic forms. We detail the disease caused by absence of the synaptic protein CNKSR2 in 8 patients ranging from 6 to 62 years old. The disease is characterized by intellectual disability, attention problems, and abrupt lifelong language loss following a brief early childhood epilepsy with continuous spike-waves in sleep. This study describes the phenotype of CNKSR2 deficiency and its involvement in systems underlying common neurological disorders.