The dysfunction of processing task-irrelevant emotional faces in pituitary patients: an evidence from expression-related visual mismatch negativity

Evidence showed impaired cognitive ability of patients with pituitary adenoma as an intracranial tumor. In the present study, we investigated the preattentive processing of emotional faces in pituitary adenoma patients by recording and analyzing the visual mismatch negativity elicited by deviant emotional faces. In the normal control group, deviant emotional faces elicited expression-related mismatch negativity (EMMN), with a more pronounced negative waveform for sad than happy face conditions. Compared with the normal group, EMMN related to sad faces was smaller in patients, whereas the EMMN related to happy faces remained the same. These data indicate the functional dysfunction of negative emotional processing at the preattentive stage of information processing in pituitary adenoma patients. * Jian Song and Chenglong Cao contributed equally to the writing of this article. Correspondence to Dr Guozheng Xu, Department of Neurosurgery, Wuhan General Hospital, 627 Wu Luo Road, Wuhan 430070, Hubei, China Tel: +86 027 0507 72471; fax:+86 027 8774 0350; e-mail: docxgz@163.com Received August 24, 2017 Accepted December 4, 2017 © 2018 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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