Physiological detection of emotion and residual cognition in disorders of consciousness

• Heart rate deceleration in response to affective auditory stimuli can probe residual emotional processing in individuals with disorders of consciousness (DOC).¹
• A pilot study (Clinical Neurophysiology, Vol. 183, March 2026) by Ardaillon et al. reports this physiological time-series approach for DOC assessment.^{1 1}

Gardner updates

• A pilot feasibility study used simultaneous PET/MR (resting-state fMRI, DTI, FDG-PET) in eight pDOC patients and eight controls to characterize metabolic, functional, and structural alterations and tentative associations with clinical behavioral responsiveness. ²

• A pilot study used heart rate deceleration in response to affective auditory stimuli to detect emotion in individuals with disorders of consciousness. ¹

• The work was published in Clinical Neurophysiology (Volume 183, March 2026) by Ardaillon, Dubois, Ndocko, Etienne, Tallon-Baudry, Luauté. ¹

Footnotes

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1388245725013215?dgcid=rss_sd_all ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2026.1761097 ↩