Parkinson's disease (PD) and Tourette's syndrome (TS) lead to important motor disorders among patients such as possible facial amimia in PD and tics in Tourette's syndrome. Under the grounded cognition framework that shows the importance of motor embodiment in emotional feeling (Niedenthal, 2007), both types of pathology with motor symptoms should be sufficient to induce potential impairments for these patients when recognizing emotional facial expressions (EFE). In this opinion paper, we describe a theoretical framework that assumes potential emotional disorders in Parkinson's disease and Tourette's syndrome based on motor disorders characterizing these two pathologies. We also review different methodological barriers in previous experimental designs that could enable the identification of emotional facial expressions despite emotional disorders in PD and TS. 1. Grounded Cognition Theory A prominent view of cognitive and emotional processes assumes that conceptual knowledge emerges from bottom-up perceptual processes to conceptual and a modal symbolic systems [1]. An alternative view has been proposed under the theoretical framework of theories of grounded cognition [2–4] suggesting that associative, limbic, and sensorimotor functional components are automatically reactivated for access to specific conceptual knowledge. This theoretical view assumes that disturbing motor processing can induce recognition impairment at the perceptual level. For instance, Strack et al. [5] have shown that participants holding a pen between their lips to inhibit smiling, or holding the pen between their teeth to facilitate smiling (Figure 1), produced significant emotional modulation with respect to the funniness of cartoons (depending on the group of inhibited facial muscles). In what follows, we argue that consistent with the grounded cognition theory, motor disorders characterizing different psychopathologies (Parkinson’s disease and Tourette’s syndrome) could be sufficient to induce disturbances in emotion processing. Figure 1: Experimental procedure used by Strack et al. [ 5]. Different neural structures have been identified as playing an important role in grounded cognition. For example, these type of links between motor systems and action understanding had previously been developed in the literature on mirror neurons, first shown in monkeys [6, 7] and more recently among humans where premotor and parietal areas were identified as important neural structures for mirror neuron system [6–8]. Cortical mirror neurons were interpreted as automatic neural processes
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