Emotion Processing Among Patients With ALS

Mild cognitive and behavioral changes occur in 35% of ALS patients and 10-15% of patients meet the criteria for FTD1-4. Recent research suggests changes in emotional perception and social cognition are a part of the neuropsychological changes in ALS, possibly associated with cognitive and behavioral symptoms seen in ALS-FTD5-9. The aim of this project is to investigate emotional perception in ALS patients compared to healthy controls and patients with other neuromuscular diseases that do not affect the central nervous system. We use a simple emotion discrimination task to evaluate emotional bias and metacognition of emotion discrimination. Moreover, this project aims to explore the correlation between emotion perception and autonomic reactivity in ALS patients by recording heart rate frequency and respiration frequency during the EDT. The project will contribute with deeper insights to the neuropsychological changes in ALS patients and the opportunity to quantify these changes. Thereby, the project will add new perspectives to the discussion of how we evaluate socio-emotional aspects of ALS in both clinical decision-making, guidance of relatives and future research.