Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is associated in about half of the cases with behavioral and cognitive disorders, including impairments in socio-emotional processing, considered as key-features for the diagnosis of the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD). The neurostructural bases of emotional deficits in ALS, however, still remain largely unexplored. Here we aim to assess emotion recognition in non-demented sporadic ALS patients compared with healthy controls, and to explore for the first time its microstructural white-matter correlates. Twenty-two subjects with either probable or definite diagnosis of ALS and 55 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls were recruited in the study. All participants performed the Ekman 60-Faces Test, assessing the recognition of six basic emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and happiness). A subgroup of subjects, comprising 19 patients and 20 healthy controls, also underwent a Diffusion Tensor Imaging scanning. Behavioral analysis highlighted a significant decline of emotion recognition skills in patients compared to controls, particularly affecting the identification of negative emotions. Moreover, the Diffusion Tensor Imaging analyses revealed a correlation between this impairment and the alteration of white-matter integrity along the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus. Our findings indicate the presence of an early emotion recognition deficit in non-demented sporadic ALS patients, associated with microstructural changes in ventral associative bundles connecting occipital, temporo-limbic and orbitofrontal regions in the right hemisphere. These changes may represent a frontotemporal-limbic microstructural marker of socio-emotional impairment in ALS.