The goal of this observational study is to learn about the emotional perception in people with ALS disease compared to people with other neuromuscular disease and healthy controls. The main questions it aims to answer are:
* How people with ALS judge happy and angry faces and what their "insight" into these judgements are like * How their autonomic responses differ from the other two test group Participants will asked to judge if a face presents a happy emotion or angry emotion.
Researchers will compare the ALS group responses with neuromuscular diseases group and healthy control group responses to see if the ALS group judge more happy faces than angry.
ALS patients, ambulant and hospitalized
Able to give informed consent
Diagnosed with ALS or probable ALS according to the existing revision of the El Escorial Criteria 21,22.
Patients with a peripheral neuromuscular disease, ambulant and hospitalized
All Participants
Other severe medical, neurological, or psychiatric disorders
Visual impairment to an extent that interferes with the ability to perform of the test
Severe motor or cognitive deficits, to the extent that the test-task cannot be performed
* Residents of Aarhus and Aalborg * Patients at Aarhus University Hospital * Patients at Aalborg University Hospital
Case-control
Cross-sectional
Emotion Discrimination Task (EDT)
Other interventionIt estimates the subjective bias and sensitivity in discriminating between happy and angry facial expressions of different intensities of emotional expression
The perception of facial emotions measured using an Emotion Discrimination Task (EDT).
The EDT requires subjects to assess the facial emotion of a face stimulus and report whether the facial emotion was angry or happy. This will be the operationalisation of subjects' emotion perception, which we anticipate will reveal a bias towards positive perceptions. There is thus two scores on this scale: "Angry" and "Happy". There is no one of these scores that is "better" than the other. It is an nominal categorical scare.
Metacognitive sensitivity measured using a retrospective confidence rating scale
Metacognitive insight will be operationalized through a metacognitive sensitivity measure. The method employed for this is a confidence rating measure, where subjects assess their own performance on the EDT. Subjects will indicate on a sliding scale, ranging from "very confident" (maximum score) to a "pure guess" (minimum score), how confident they are that their previous answer was correct. Generally higher scores on this scale is considered better. This scales title is: " Confidence Rating Scale".
Subjects' heart rate is monitored throughout the EDT
Subjects heart rate is measured through a standard 3-lead electrocardiogram montage. Electrodes were place on both collarbones and on the left lower rib.
Subjects' respiration is monitored throughout the EDT
Subjects' respiration is measured using a respiratory belt around the upper torso.
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
University of Aarhus
Lead sponsor
Aarhus University Hospital
Collaborator
Aalborg University Hospital
Collaborator
