How does emotion recognition differ in children with epilepsy?

Epilepsy is a brain disorder characterized by recurring seizures. 🧠 It most commonly starts during childhood 🧒 or older adulthood 👨‍🦳. The most common form of epilepsy in youth is “temporal lobe epilepsy”, which impacts parts of the brain that help us understand social and emotional information. 🎭 To better understand the impact of early-onset epilepsy on youth’s social perception, we investigated emotion recognition skills in youth with and without epilepsy. Compared to youth without epilepsy, we found that youth with epilepsy struggled to identify emotional expressions in faces. This was related to different brain activation patterns in the temporal lobe. DSEC Lab Research Assistant Sophie Ye breaks down these findings and their implications for youth with epilepsy, as well as where future research can go with these results. 📝

#epilepsy #scicomm #knowledgetranslation #research

Dual systems model and adolescence

Welcome back to our third installment of our Brain & Emotions series! 🧠 This episode is about understanding risk-taking in adolescence. Compared to children and adults, teenagers tend to take more risks than children and adults in their daily lives. 🚫 Why is that? There are many theories about this, but one theory is the “dual systems model”. This theory suggests that there are changes in the teenage brain that make risk-taking more likely. 💥 On one hand, the teenage brain is very sensitive to rewards (see episode 2 about this!). 🍭 At the same time, the brain systems that allow us to regulate (or control) our behaviours may not be fully developed yet. The mismatch between these two brain systems is thought to make teenagers more likely to take risks.

Let’s talk about this theory! Do you think this makes sense to explain risk-taking in adolescence? Let us know in the comments below! 👇 (Special thanks to former DSEC Lab volunteer Bingyi Lin for her work in creating these slides!)

Bullying during adolescence

Bullying is a real problem for many children and adolescents. Youth who are victims of bullying, as well as those who witness bullying, can struggle with their mental health and experience poorer well-being. 🥀
Many research labs are interested in understanding more about how to prevent bullying from happening, and to help victims respond to provocation by peers. 🤝 For example, the DSEC Lab is currently running an online study (#LISTEN) to answer some of these questions: see link in bio for more details!
If you or someone you know needs help to deal with the consequences of bullying, check out the resources on the last slide (and visit prevnet.ca for more information). 💕 (Thanks to Silvia Zhou & Emma Ilyaz for putting this information together!)