Facial emotion recognition in deaf children: Evidence from event-related potentials and event-related spectral perturbation analysis.

Impairment of facial emotion recognition ability has been reported in deaf children, but few researches have examined the neural mechanism of this impairment. This study applied the electroencephalogram (EEG) technique to investigate the emotion recognition ability in 31 deaf children and 30 hearing controls with facial emotion recognition task. Results from behavioral task showed that deaf children exhibited lower accuracy compared to hearing controls. As for EEG analysis, results showed that deaf children showed diminished activation in the early (N1、P1), middle (N170) and late stages (late positive potential, LPP) compared to hearing controls. In addition, for brain oscillation, alpha band (400-800 ms) also revealed a reduced desynchronization in deaf children. The present findings seem to indicate that the deficit during facial emotion recognition ability among deaf children might be due to the impairments in visual processing, attention and emotional semantic distribution ability during facial emotion recognition processing.