Abstract Details

Title Emotion Recognition Deficits in Huntington’s Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Across Modalities and Disease Stages

Topic Movement Disorders

Presentation(s) P2 - Poster Session 2 (11:45 AM-12:45 PM)

Poster/Presentation
Number 16-012

Objective

To assess the magnitude and pattern of emotion-recognition deficits in Huntington’s disease (HD) across sensory modalities and emotional categories, and to identify demographic, clinical and methodological factors moderating these impairments.

Background HD is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor, cognitive, and psychiatric disturbances. Emerging evidence suggests that impairments in social cognition are prominent across different stages of HD. However, findings amongst studies have been inconsistent, possibly due to variations in task paradigms, disease stage, and the assessed sensory domains.

Design/Methods

A systematic search of PubMed/Medline was conducted on October 2nd, 2025, using keywords [(“Huntington’s disease” OR “Huntington”) AND (“emotion recognition” OR “emotion perception”)]. Studies were screened independently by two reviewers and were included if they are peer-reviewed human studies with validated emotion recognition tasks and reported sufficient data to compute effect sizes. Data were extracted and results were pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis model in JASP.

Results Our search identified 190 references. After screening, 74 studies were retained for full-text review and 24 studies ultimately met inclusion criteria. HD patients showed particularly robust deficits in negative emotion recognition (d= 1.36, 95% CI [1.12, 1.61]), particularly in anger (d= 1.61), disgust (d= 1.56), and fear (d= 1.47). In addition, HD patients show a large and significant impairment in recognizing negative emotions from facial expressions (d= 1.39, p< 0.001), while deficits in other modality recognition were nonsignificant. Interestingly, meta-regression showed that the proportion of male participants significantly moderated deficits (p< 0.001), with higher proportions of males associated with greater deficits.

Conclusions Our meta-analysis demonstrates that emotion-recognition deficits are a robust feature of HD. The selective vulnerability of negative emotion processing points to specific striatal-limbic circuit dysfunction. These findings support emotion recognition tasks as potential early biomarkers for disease progression monitoring.

The observed sex effect suggests potential sex-specific differences in vulnerability and neuropathology in HD.

Authors/Disclosures
Yagiz M. Altun, MD, PhD (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) PRESENTER	Dr. Altun has nothing to disclose.
Siyu Yan, MS	Ms. Yan has nothing to disclose.
Golnoush Akhlaghipour, MD	Dr. Akhlaghipour has nothing to disclose.
Dorothy D. Nguyen, MD (Montefiore)	Dr. Nguyen has nothing to disclose.
Kunal Debroy, MD (Montefiore Medical Center)	Mr. Debroy has nothing to disclose.
Ashini Patel, MD	Dr. Patel has nothing to disclose.
Harrison Lee	Harrison Lee has nothing to disclose.
Swanny Shi	Swanny Shi has nothing to disclose.

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