Embodying Emotional Disorders: New Hypotheses about Possible Emotional Consequences of Motor Disorders in Parkinson's Disease and Tourette's Syndrome

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.