Nathalie Ehrlé

Reims hospital, Lille CNRS · Neurology

The production of facial emotions is an important conveyor of social communication. The present review of the literature concerns the congruence of facial emotions, that is the facial muscular activation that takes place in response to the emotional facial expression perceived in others. Although scientific interest in facial emotions has increased...

The model of humour comprehension-elaboration postulates that the feeling of amusement follows serially upon humour comprehension. Yet, in clinical practice, patients with impaired humour comprehension may show typical happy facial expressions, suggesting a preservation of amusement feeling. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis o...

The aim of this paper was to assess the genuineness of a case of phoneme color synesthesia (VA) by evaluating the influence of several psycholinguistic levels with different stimuli (isolated vowels, nonsense syllables, and words). Results demonstrate the robustness of the synesthesia no matter what the type of stimuli. To explore how this form of...

Introduction. – Although frequently observed in neurological disorders, social-cognitive deficits, which contribute to social behavior dysfunction, remain poorly assessed in clinical neuropsychology. A new task has been developed to better screen for these deficits. Objectives. – REALSoCog was used in two case studies (SL, 41-years-old, severe head...

Although previous studies have suggested that some component processes of social cognition decline in normal aging, several methodological limitations can be pointed out. Traditional sociocognitive tasks assess processes separately and lack ecological validity. In the present study, the main aim was to propose an integrative social cognition assess...

Introduction L’humour, fonction émotionnelle et intellectuelle complexe, est principalement évalué avec des tâches évaluant la détection et la résolution d’incongruité. L’évaluation de l’appréciation de l’humour a toutefois été négligée. Objectifs L’objectif était d’évaluer la possibilité de quantifier l’appréciation de l’humour à partir de l’anal...

Introduction Le mimétisme facial, défini comme un comportement involontaire impliquant une activation congruente des muscles faciaux lors de l’observation de l’expression d’autrui, a principalement été documenté grâce à l’électromyographie. Objectifs Les objectifs étaient d’évaluer la possibilité de quantifier le mimétisme facial à partir de l’ana...

Background : The Minimal Assessment of Cognitive Function in Multiple sclerosis (MACFIMS) is an internationally recognised battery of neuropsychological tests for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Objectives : To establish regression-based norms for the MACFIMS in French-speaking healthy subjects (HS) and validate its use in persons with mult...

In multiple sclerosis, conflicting results have been reported between social impairment and relatively preserved moral judgments, mainly tested with moral dilemmas. Some results even yet suggest signs of "ultra-morality" in these patients. The objective of the present study was to test this hypothesis with the moral/conventional distinction task, i...

In multiple sclerosis (MS), medical comprehension of website information and informed consent is reported to be impaired. The aim of the present study was to investigate oral medical comprehension of literal, figurative and humorous language in MS through videos of physician-patient exchanges. A group of 35 MS patients was compared to a control gro...

Background: Sociocognition is an important field of neuropsychology involving human interactions. In relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, it was recently demonstrated that sociocognition is severely and precociously impaired. Among sociocognitive abilities, humour has not yet been considered in this disease despite its important social function...

We studied the comprehension abilities of healthy participants with a French version of the Chapman-Cook Speed of Reading Test. The objective was to assess the effect of gender, age and educational level on chronometric performances and errors. In this test, the task is to cross out an inappropriate word within short passages. In the original versi...

Depuis une trentaine d’annees, la conception exclusivement motrice du cervelet a ete revisee et de nombreux arguments temoignent de son implication dans des processus aussi bien affectifs que cognitifs. Une topographie fonctionnelle du cervelet a ainsi pu etre etablie, avec une dissociation entre le lobe anterieur, qui interviendrait dans les aspec...

Objective: Schizophrenia is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech and behavior, and other symptoms that cause social or occupational dysfunction. However, some of these symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, can be indicative of other phenomena such as synesthesia and savant abilities. The aim of this paper is to...

Introduction L’éducation thérapeutique (ETP) occupe une place centrale dans la prise en charge de la maladie de Parkinson (MPI), mais ses bénéfices n’ont été que rarement étudiés et encore jamais comparés à d’autres formes de soutien thérapeutique. Objectifs Étudier le bénéfice clinique d’ateliers d’ETP en comparaison à une prise en charge en grou...

Memory impairment, especially verbal episodic memory (VEM), represents a common ground for cognitive complaint in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Beyond the difficulty caused in daily life, these deficits may impact on occupational activities. Neuropsychological assessment of these patients has to include VEM tests, to describe the level of...

Introduction L’éducation thérapeutique (ETP) figure parmi les priorités nationales de prise en charge de la maladie de Parkinson (MPI). Toutefois, son bénéfice clinique n’a été que rarement exploré. Objectifs Étudier le bénéfice clinique d’ateliers d’ETP sur la qualité de vie (QDV), l’humeur, l’anxiété et l’estime de soi de patients présentant une...

The management of patients with Alzheimer's disease is a significant public health problem given the limited effectiveness of pharmacological therapies combined with iatrogenic effects of drug treatments in dementia. Consequently, the development of nondrug care, such as musical interventions, has become a necessity. The experimental rigor of studi...

Memory impairment, especially verbal episodic memory (VEM), represents a common ground for cognitive complaint in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Beyond the difficulty caused in daily life, these deficits may impact on occupational activities.Neuropsychological assessment of these patients has to include VEM tests, to describe the level of d...

Objective: It is widely accepted that working memory (WM) impairment has a high incidence in multiple sclerosis (MS). However, this WM impairment has rarely been analyzed with reference to a cognitive model. The aim of the study was to determine whether dysfunction in MS is due to WM or short-term memory deficits. Methods: We assessed the component...

Objective: Various verbal episodic memory impairments have been demonstrated in multiple sclerosis (MS), including encoding, retrieval and storage processes. Our clinical experiment suggests that a subset of MS patients may show another pattern with a distinctive evolution of performances after a 20 minutes delay (short-delay versus long-delay free...

Although musical interventions have recently gained popularity as a non-pharmacological treatment in dementia, there is still insufficient evidence of their effectiveness. To investigate this issue, a single-center randomized controlled trial was conducted with forty-eight patients with Alzheimer's disease or mixed dementia to compare the effects o...

Frontotemporal lobe degeneration includes a large spectrum of neurodegenerative disorders. Patients with frontotemporal dementia with parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17 exhibit heterogeneity in both clinical and neuropathological features. Here, we report the case of a young patient with a G389R mutation. This teenager girl was 17 years old when...

Introduction Dans la SEP-R, les troubles socio-émotionnels semblent maintenant bien établis (reconnaissance d'émotions faciales, attribution de pensées, faux-pas,...) mais les co-morbidités cognitives sont fréquentes.

Les années récentes ont vu émerger, avec l’arrivée d’essais thérapeutiques portant sur de possibles « disease modifying drugs (DMD) », le besoin d’un diagnostic précoce et fiable de patients atteints d’une maladie d’Alzheimer (MA) à un stade très précoce, prédémentiel ou prodromique. Certains moyens nouveaux, comme le marquage cérébral in vivo des...

Background and purpose: Patients with amygdala lesions were found to be impaired in recognizing the fear emotion both from face and from music. In patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), impairment in recognition of emotions from facial expressions was reported for disgust, fear, sadness and anger, but no studies had yet investigated this populati...

Clinical case studies have long been recognized as a useful adjunct to problem-based learning and continuing professional development. They emphasize the need for clinical reasoning, integrative thinking, problem-solving, communication, teamwork and self-directed learning - all desirable generic skills for health care professionals. Epilepsy is amo...

Gerstmann's syndrome (GS) is defined by a clinical tetrad including acalculia, finger anomia, left-right disorientation and agraphia. In this article, we describe the case of a 42-year-old woman suffering from an aggressive relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis in which a systematic neuropsychological assessment revealed Gertsmann's syndrome among...

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of semantic stimulation of Alzheimer's patients on semantic memory comparatively to psychological support. We conducted semantic training with two target categories (musical instruments and human actions), because these concepts were massively failed in previous data collected in Alzheimer's disea...

The present study investigated object recognition impairment and the existence of category effects in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. A battery of tests was designed to assess the deterioration of semantic memory and/or the existence of agnosia by evaluating visual and auditory naming, knowledge of structural descriptions (pre-semantic repr...

This paper presents a French battery designed to assess emotional and sociocognitive abilities in neurological patients in clinical practice. The first part of this battery includes subtests assessing emotions: a recognition task of primary facial emotions, a discrimination task of facial emotions, a task of expressive intensity judgment, a task of...

Previous data collected in healthy elderly participants by our laboratory suggested impairment of visual and auditory object processing in normal aging. This impairment seemed not to be related to simple perceptual deficits. The aim of the present study was to identify the mechanism of this disorder according to serial models of object recognition,...

Studies carried out in nonmusical domains provide evidence that abnormal responses to emotionally neutral stimuli are associated with medial temporal lobe (MTL) dysfunction at the level of the amygdala. In this investigation,we propose that music will be an adequate candidate to examine the role of MTL structures in judging emotional neutrality. By...

This study explored the influence of several factors, physical and human, on anisochrony's thresholds measured with an adaptive two alternative forced choice paradigm. The effect of the number and duration of sounds on anisochrony discrimination was tested in the first experiment as well as potential interactions between each of these factors and t...

Contemporary neuropsychological studies have stressed the widely distributed and multicomponential nature of human affective processes. Here, we examined facial electromyographic (EMG) (zygomaticus and corrugator muscle activity), autonomic (skin conductance and heart rate) and subjective measures of affective valence and arousal in patient TG, a 3...

This study addressed the role of the medial temporal lobe regions and, more specifically, the contribution of the human hippocampus in memory for body-centered (egocentric) and environment-centered (allocentric) spatial location. Twenty-one patients with unilateral atrophy of the hippocampus secondary to long-standing epilepsy (left, n = 7; right,...

The study of psychopathological disorders in organic cerebral illnesses comes up against numerous conceptual and methodological difficulties. The major impact of these disorders on patients and their entourage makes it essential that multidisciplinary research work and clinical collaboration should be developed. Only in this way will it be possible...

In this article, we present norms for a standardized set of 144 melodic excerpts. The melodies have been standardized on four variables corresponding to familiarity, verbal evocations, musical categories (vocal or instrumental) and age of acquisition. For this purpose, estimations were obtained in 120 French university students. The results show th...

This chapter explores the epileptic patients with either left (LTL) or right (RTL) temporal lobe lesions as well as normal control subjects (NC) in two different tasks involving the processing of time-related (temporal) information. It also examines the processing of temporal microvariations in music. The results show the specialization of LTL stru...

Patients with either left or right antero-medial-temporal lobe (MTL) resection were investigated as to their ability to reproduce and produce three durations (5, 14, or 38 s) in three conditions (silence, counting, articulatory suppression). The results showed that patients with unilateral MTL lesions did not differ from controls when they had to e...

The role of the temporal lobes in processing time-related (temporal) information was tested in a task of anisochrony (or irregularity) discrimination assessing the temporal processing of sequential auditory information according to different presentation rates or tempos (between 80 and 1000 ms inter-onset intervals, IOI). Epileptic patients with ei...

Norms for a musical corpus. In this article, we present norms for a standardized set of 144 melodie excerpts. The melodies have been standardized on four variables corresponding to familiarity, verbal evocations, musical categories (vocal or instrumental) and age of acquisition. For this purpose, estimations were obtained in 120 French university s...

An impairment of verbal memory has consistently been associated with resection of the left dominant temporal lobe, whereas non-verbal memory deficits have been less reliably observed following resection of the right temporal lobe. Such a dissociation may be due to material-specific differences of processing between verbal and non-verbal information...

Lesion studies in monkeys suggest that neocortical subregions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) carry memory functions independent of the hippocampal formation. The present study investigates possible differential contributions of MTL subregions to spatial memory in humans. Eye movements toward remembered spatial cues (memory-guided saccades) with...

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, 1998.