Facial Expression Recognition of Emotion and Categorization of Emotional Words in Gilles de la Tourette's Syndrome

Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome is a childhood onset inherited neuropsychiatric disorder characterised by the presence of both multiple motor tics and one or more vocal tics (noises), with psychiatric and/or behaviour disorders (such as obsessive compulsive behaviour...).

This disease is associated with an dopamine system imbalance which could be responsible of a specific trouble in the recognition in some facial expression. This has been already shown in Gilles de la Tourette patients with obsessive compulsive behaviour.

We hypothesise that patients with Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome present a dysfunction of voluntary and automatic treatment of emotional information.

The main purpose of this study is to show if patients with Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome present a lack of specific facial expression recognition of emotion and determinate more precisely if this alteration involves the cortical way (high frequency way) or the under cortical way (low frequency way).