NCT05383235

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

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 30 (actual)
• Sponsor: Hôpital le Vinatier · Academic / Other
• Sex: Male
• Age: 25 Years – 55 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

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).

Detailed 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.

Conditions

• Child Sexual Abuse
• Emotion Recognition

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	ROUTINE CARE	1\. ROUTINE CARE : retrieval of sociodemographic characteristics, medical and psychological assessment, multidisciplinary meeting about the patient
DEVICE	Facial emotion stimuli prensentation task with EEG recording and facial emotion recognition task	2\. RUN-IN PERIOD : * Eligibility criteria will be assessed during the multidisciplinary meeting; * Study presentation, delivery of the information note and consent form; 3. STUDY: * Collection of consent form; * Facial emotion stimuli presentation task with EEG recording and facial emotion recording task; * Neuropsychological evaluation (TOM-15); * Scales and questionnaires (TAS-20, PCL-R SV, CECAQ, QCAE); * Debriefing.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-07-12
• Primary completion: 2025-05-15
• Completion: 2025-05-15
• First posted: 2022-05-20
• Last updated: 2025-07-24

Locations

1 site across 1 country: France