Facial Emotion Recognition in Patients Who Committed Sexual Assault Against Children: an EEG Study — EMOREC  

Child Sexual Abuse Clinical Trial

Official title: Facial Emotion Recognition in Patients Who Committed Sexual Assault Against Children: an EEG Study

Status Not yet recruiting

Clinical Trial Summary

This study aims to compare the emotional processing in sexual offenders against children versus healthy volunteers using an objective electrophysiological measurement (EEG) during a facial emotion stimuli presentation task. Secondary goal is to assess emotion recognition performances in this population and evaluate the impact of various factors on these performances (type of emotion, age and sex of person expressing the emotion, neuropsychological and cognitive abilities of the subjects).

Clinical Trial Description

Sexual abuse is a major public health issue. Apart from medical care of victims, it appears essential to intervene with sexual offenders for prevention purposes (from primary prevention to avoid a first sexual abuse to secondary and tertiary prevention to avoid recurrence). In order to improve those prevention strategies, further understanding of offenders neuropsychological and cognitive processes is needed.

Facial emotion recognition capacities, that play a major role in social cognition and generation of appropriate social behavior, has been the subject of few studies in sexual offenders. These studies show heterogeneous results and only one of them specifically targets sexual offenders against children. Furthermore, no study has investigated facial emotion recognition in this population with an objective measurement of emotional processing, such as electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. LPP (late positive potential) amplitude, measured in EEG, is a marker of emotional processing and appears to be modified in particular populations (eg. psychopaths) in response to negative visual stimuli compared to positive stimuli.

The investigators aim to determine whether LPP amplitude in response to negative facial expressions is modified in sexual offenders against children compared to healthy volunteers and compared to amplitude in response to positive facial expressions.

Effect of facial emotion characteristics (type of emotion, age and sex of person expressing the emotion) on EEG response will be assessed.

Various neuropsychological and cognitive characteristics (facial emotion recognition, theory of mind, psychopathic traits, childhood trauma, and alexithymia) of patients and controls will also be measured through neuropsychological evaluation and completion of scales and questionnaires, in order to investigate the impact of those factors on facial emotion recognition performances. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Child Sexual Abuse

• NCT number: NCT05383235
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Hôpital le Vinatier
• Contact: Sabine MOUCHET, PH
• Phone: 0437915309
• Email: sabine.mouchet@ch-le-vinatier.fr
• Status: Not yet recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: May 20, 2022
• Completion date: May 20, 2026