The Effect of tDCS on Emotion Recognition and EEG
Condition: Emotion Recognition
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      Purpose and Importance of the Project: Emotion recognition, which is defined as the process
      of interpreting an individual's emotional state by looking at their facial expressions, is
      important in maintaining social relations and communication in a healthy way. Difficulties in
      emotion recognition can be seen in various neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorders. The
      ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is one of the regions that is important in the
      function of emotion recognition from facial expressions. Transcranial Direct Current
      Stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive, painless method of brain stimulation that provides
      either excitatory or inhibitory effects on different parts of the brain. When the literature
      is examined, it is seen that studies on the effectiveness of tDCS on emotion recognition are
      limited and stimulation is generally applied to the right or left dorsolateral prefrontal
      cortex areas in these studies. On the other hand, no study has been found examining the
      effect of stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex on emotion recognition. In this
      study, it is aimed to investigate the effect of anodal stimulation of the ventromedial
      prefrontal cortex, which is significantly related to emotion recognition skills, on emotion
      recognition and EEG oscillations.

      Methods: It is an experimental, randomised controlled trial. The data will be collected with
      the convenience sampling method from healthy and volunteer participants. The matched-group
      design method will be used. As a result of the power analysis, it was determined that the
      current study should be done with at least 34 participants. In the study, it is aimed to
      include a total of 60 participants in the experimental (tDCS) and control (sham) groups.
      Measurement instruments are "Informed Voluntary Consent Form"; "Demographic Information
      Form"; "Edinburgh Hand Preference Survey"; "Beck Depression Scale"; "Amsterdam Dynamic Facial
      Expression Set - Bath Intensity Variations (ADFES-BIV)"; "Mind-Reading Test"; EEG and tDCS
      devices. Participants will be subjected to the emotion recognition task before and after the
      tDCS. In addition, resting state EEG recordings will be taken before and after the tDCS from
      34 participants.
    

Detailed description: 
      Measurement instruments:

        -  Informed Voluntary Consent Form

        -  Demographic Information Form

        -  Edinburgh Hand Preference Survey

        -  Beck Depression Scale

        -  Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set - Bath Intensity Variations (ADFES-BIV)

        -  Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test

        -  EEG and tDCS devices

      Statistics:

      The findings obtained from experimental and control groups the pretest-posttest of the
      emotion recognition and resting state EEG measurement will be evaluated with Repeated
      Measures Analysis of Variance (within and between groups) (or Friedman Analysis, which is its
      non-parametric counterpart). For all tests applied to the variables, the significance value
      will be accepted as p<0.05.
    

Intervention name(s): Active tDCS; Sham tDCS
Intervention type(s): Device; Device
Intervention description(s): 20 min, 2 milliampere (mA), Anodal tDCS in vmPFC; 20 min, vmPFC Sham tDCS
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Intervention model description: It is an experimental, randomised controlled trial. The data will be collected with the convenience sampling method from healthy and volunteer participants. The matched-group design method will be used.
Masking: Single (Participant)
Primary purpose: Basic Science
Keywords: Emotion Recognition; tDCS; EEG Oscillations; vmPFC