Impairment of eye emotion discrimination in benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes: A neuropsychological study

PURPOSE: To explore the characteristics of the impairment of eye emotional recognition and related clinical factors in children with benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECT). METHODS: The Eye Basic Emotion Discrimination Task and Eye Complex Emotion Discrimination Task were used to study emotion discrimination in 33 recently diagnosed BECT patients and 33 BECT patients after complete remission compared to respective age‐ and gender‐matched comparison participants. RESULTS: The scores for discrimination of sadness, fear, and disgust were significantly lower in the newly diagnosed BECT group than in the comparison group (p = .004, p = .019, and p = .044, respectively), while scores for recognizing happiness, anger, and surprise were not significantly different between the two groups (p = .248, p = .586, and p = .540, respectively). Our analysis revealed that the BECT onset age influences the scores for recognition of sadness, fear, and disgust (OR = 1.795, 95% CI: 1.097 to 2.936, p = .020; OR=1.846, 95% CI: 1.124 to 3.034, p = .016; OR = 1.851, 95% CI: 1.131–3.029, p = .014). After remission, the scores for discrimination of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and surprise of the BECT group were not significantly different from the comparison group (p = .588, p = .765, p = .752, p = .984, p = .328, and p = .339, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: In our study, newly diagnosed BECT patients exhibited emotion discrimination dysfunction, mainly related to sadness, fear, and disgust, and this dysfunction was more severe the younger the age of onset was. However, after BECT remission, the ability to discriminate emotions returned to normal.