Facial emotion recognition in childhood: The effects of febrile seizures in the developing brain

•This is the first study on emotional abilities in children with febrile seizures (FSs).•FSs are associated with impaired facial emotion recognition (FER) during school age.•FER deficit is at least partly independent of common visuoperceptual abilities.•Early developmental insults linked to FSs may affect medial temporal lobe functions.

It has been documented that anteromedial temporal lobe dysfunction can cause impairment in emotional intelligence. In particular, medial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) is associated with disorders in emotion recognition from facial expressions. About one-third of patients with MTLE experienced febrile seizures (FSs) during childhood. In the present study, we investigated facial emotion recognition ability in a group of 38 school-aged children with antecedent FSs and in an age- and sex-matched control group. Children with abnormal general visuoperceptual abilities were excluded. Children with FSs showed lower recognition scores versus controls in both matching (28.64 vs 33.47; p < .0001) and labeling (21.25 vs 23.03; p = .001) facial emotions. Our findings support the hypothesis that FSs can be associated during childhood with a dysfunction within the neural network subserving the processing of facial expressions of the basic emotions.