Fig 1.
Example sequence of the event related fMRI paradigm of different intensities of emotions and meaningless and neutral stimuli.
In total three trials, each including 26 stimulation sequences was presented. A stimulation sequence consisted of a block of three stimuli of one second interleaved by rest epochs of one second. Each block was followed by a rest period of nine seconds. Stimulus blocks of different emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and happiness; here only fear and happiness are displayed as examples) with different intensities and neutral and meaningless stimuli were presented in a randomized order. Reprinted from FEEST [23] under a CC BY license, with permission from Paul Ekman Group, LLC, original copyright 2002.
Table 1.
Participants of the behavioral emotion recognition task.
Table 2.
Participants of the fMRI paradigm.
Fig 2.
Number of correct categorizations of facial emotion expressions.
* indicates statistical significance with p<0.05 and ** indicates statistical significance with p<0.01 between patients (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 29) in a two-sample t-test.
Table 3.
Means and standard deviations of correct categorization of facial stimuli in ALS patients and healthy controls of the emotion recognition task at behavioral level of all patients and patients that participated in fMRI.
Fig 3.
Increased activation of ALS patients compared to healthy controls when processing different emotional facial expressions.
Activation in a sub region of the right inferior frontal gyrus (MNI coordinates: x = 49mm y = 18mm z = 30mm; cluster size = 37 voxels; T = 3.53; puncorr = 0.001), right angular gyrus (MNI coordinates: x = 56mm y = -58mm z = 34mm; cluster size = 102 voxels; T = 4.40; puncorr<0.001) and right precuneus (MNI coordinates: x = 6mm y = -62mm z = 34mm; cluster size = 31 voxels; T = 3.42; puncorr = 0.001). Activations show areas with significant increase of activity in patients in average for all emotions.
Table 4.
Regions of increased activation in processing emotional facial stimuli in ALS patients compared to healthy controls (all emotions averaged).
Table 5.
Regions of decreased activation in processing emotional facial stimuli in ALS patients compared to healthy controls (all emotions averaged).
Fig 4.
Regression analysis of brain activity and social contacts during processing of emotional facial stimuli in ALS patients.
Activation in a subregion of right inferior frontal gyrus/Brodmann Area 44 and 45. MNI-coordinates: x = 44mm, y = 21mm, z = 30mm; cluster-size = 12 voxels; T = 3.36; puncorr = 0.003.