Empathy and emotion recognition in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy

•We firstly describe the deficits in empathy in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy.•We found the dissociation of emotional and cognitive empathy in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy.•The deficits in cognitive empathy are positively correlated with sadness emotion recognition.

Patients with epilepsy have deficits in social cognition. In this study, we examined the changes in empathy and eye emotion recognition using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and eye emotion recognition tasks. Forty-two patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy and 47 healthy controls were involved. The eye emotion recognition and cognitive empathy abilities of the patients with IGE were impaired, but the affective empathy was intact. The cognitive empathy performance of the patients with IGE was positively correlated with their performance in sadness recognition, MoCA, verbal fluency, and the Stroop test. These results suggest that the empathy ability was impaired in patients with IGE, and this impairment may be caused by deficits in frontal lobe function.