Emotion understanding through face and body in children with self-limited epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes

Emotion recognition (ER) is a core socio-cognitive skill supported by distributed brain networks, including face-selective occipito-temporal regions, the superior temporal sulcus, and the amygdala, which interact with body-selective areas and visuo-motor systems to generate unified affective representations. In self-limited epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (SeLECTS), functional disruptions in fronto-temporo-parietal circuits may selectively impair facial decoding, while body-based pathways remain relatively preserved and may act as compensatory routes. To test this hypothesis, twenty-five participants with SeLECTS, age- and gender-matched with a control group, completed three ER tasks: a facial expression recognition task, a bodily expression recognition task, and a face–body congruency task. Participants completed behavioural tasks and were assessed on their cognitive abilities and emotional-behavioural functioning. Compared with controls, children with SeLECTS exhibited impaired recognition of emotions when conveyed by isolated faces and showed preserved performance for bodily expressions. In the face–body task, congruent stimuli facilitated performance overall, but children with SeLECTS showed lower overall accuracy than controls, with no evidence of a group-specific incongruency cost. These findings suggest that body-based emotional cues may provide useful contextual support when facial emotion processing is less efficient, although their compensatory role in SeLECTS requires further investigation. The results have important implications, as they indicate that interventions emphasizing body-based emotional signals could strengthen socio-emotional development in paediatric epilepsy.