The Efficacy of Emotion Recognition Rehabilitation for People with Alzheimer’s Disease (original) (raw)
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Emotion-discrimination deficits in mild Alzheimer disease
The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, 2005
Mild Alzheimer disease (AD) preferentially affects temporal lobe regions, which represent important structures in memory and emotional processes. This study investigated emotion discrimination in people with mild AD, versus Caretakers. Twenty AD subjects and 22 caretakers underwent computerized testing of emotion recognition and differentiation. Performances between groups were compared, controlling for possible effects of age and cognitive abilities. AD subjects showed diminished recognition of happy, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions. They also exhibited decreased differentiation between happy and sad expressions. Controlling for effects of cognitive dysfunction, AD subjects differed on recognition of happy and sad, and differentiation of sad facial expressions, and in error patterns for fearful and neutral faces. Diminished abilities for emotion discrimination are present in persons with mild AD. In persons with mild AD, who frequently reside in their own home or with close f...
The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, 2008
To investigate emotion discrimination abilities in healthy comparison subjects, patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), early and moderate Alzheimer disease (AD). Prospective study design. Outpatient memory clinic, Department of Psychiatry, Innsbruck, Austria. One hundred forty-one subjects older than 60 years were included in the study. Thirty-five subjects were classified as healthy comparison subjects, 51 subjects as MCI (21 subjects with amnestic MCI single domain, 31 subjects with amnestic MCI multiple domain), 32 subjects with early AD and 23 subjects with moderate AD. All subjects were tested on an extensive neuropsychological test battery including the Penn Emotion Recognition Tests and depression symptoms were assessed additionally. Healthy subjects and patients with MCI, early and moderate AD differed significantly in the recognition of all emotions and neutral faces combined. When separated by emotion, the authors found significant differences in emotion recognitio...
Emotional Processing in Healthy Ageing, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer’s Disease
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Emotional processing, particularly facial expression recognition, is essential for social cognition, and dysfunction may be associated with poor cognitive health. In pathological ageing conditions, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which cognitive impairments are present, disturbed emotional processing and difficulty with social interactions have been documented. However, it is unclear how pathological ageing affects emotional processing and human social behaviour. The aim of this study is to provide insight into how emotional processing is affected in MCI and AD and whether this capacity can constitute a differentiating factor allowing the preclinical diagnosis of both diseases. For this purpose, an ecological emotional battery adapted from five subsets of the Florida Affect Battery was used. Given that emotion may not be separated from cognition, the affect battery was divided into subtests according to cognitive demand, resulting in three bl...
An Exploratory Study on Facial Emotion Recognition Capacity in Beginning Alzheimer’s Disease
European Neurology, 2011
Objective: It was the aim of this study to investigate facial emotion recognition (FER) in the elderly with cognitive impairment. Method: Twelve patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 12 healthy control subjects were asked to name dynamic or static pictures of basic facial emotions using the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test and to assess the degree of their difficulty in the recognition task, while their electrodermal conductance was registered as an unconscious processing measure. Results: AD patients had lower objective recognition performances for disgust and fear, but only disgust was accompanied by decreased subjective FER in AD patients. The electrodermal response was similar in all groups. No significant effect of dynamic versus static emotion presentation on FER was found. Conclusion: Selective impairment in recognizing facial expressions of disgust and fear may indicate a nonlinear decline in FER capacity with increasing cognitive impairment and result from progressi...
Facial emotion recognition deficit in amnestic mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease
American Journal of …, 2008
Alzheimer disease (AD). However, this issue has been underexplored in subjects with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI). Thus, the authors aimed to determine whether a deficit in facial emotion recognition is present in a-MCI phase and whether this is intensity dependent. A secondary aim was to investigate relationships between facial emotion recognition and cognitive performances. Design: Case-control study. Setting: Memory clinic. Participants: Fifty a-MCI patients, 50 mild AD patients, and 50 comparison subjects (COM) were enrolled. Measurements: Information about facial emotion recognition was obtained from Penn Emotion Recognition Test. The Mental Deterioration Battery was used to measure cognitive impairment. Results: Mild AD patients were more impaired in the recognition of almost all emotional stimuli of all intensities than a-MCI and COM subjects. However, there was an increased progression only in lowintensity facial emotion recognition deficit from COM to a-MCI to mild AD patients. In particular, a-MCI subjects differed significantly from COM in low-intensity fearful face recognition performance. This deficit in a-MCI patients was explained by the short-term verbal memory impairment, whereas the same deficit in mild AD patients was explained by the long-term verbal memory impairment. Conclusions: Emotion recognition progresses from a deficit in low-intensity fearful facial recognition in a-MCI phase to a deficit in all intensities and emotions in mild AD. This could be an effect of the progressive degeneration of brain structures modulating emotional processing. An early detection of emotional impairment in MCI phases of dementia may have clinical implications. (Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 2008; 16:389 -398)
Emotion processing in the visual and auditory domains by patients with Alzheimer's disease
Journal of the …, 1999
The ability to process emotional information was assessed in 42 individuals: 23 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 19 healthy elderly controls. Four tasks assessed the ability to recognize emotion in audiotaped voices, in drawings of emotional situations, and in videotaped vignettes displaying emotions in facial expression, gestures, and body movements. Hemispheric dominance for processing facial expressions of emotions was also examined. There were no consistent group differences in the ability to process emotion presented via the auditory domain (i.e., nonverbal sounds, such as crying or shrieking, and speech prosody). Controls were, however, significantly better than the AD patients in identifying emotions depicted in drawings of emotional situations and in videotaped scenes displaying faces, gestures, and body movements. These differences were maintained after statistically adjusting for the visuospatial abilities of the participants. After a statistical adjustment for abstraction ability, some of the tasks continued to differentiate the groups (e.g., the emotional drawings task, the videotaped displays of faces), but others did not. These results confirm and extend previous results indicating that AD patients do not have a primary deficit in the processing of emotion. They suggest that the difficulties of the AD patients in perceiving emotion are secondary to the cognitive impairments associated with AD. (JINS, 1999, 5, 32-40.)
Deficits in Facial Emotion Processing in Mild Cognitive Impairment
Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, 2007
Background: Patients with Alzheimer disease consistently demonstrate impaired performance on tests of facial emotion processing. However, it remains unclear how early in the neurodegenerative process these deficits emerge. Methods: We approached this question by examining facial emotional processing in a ‘pre-dementia’ condition, amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Nine single-domain amnestic MCI subjects, 14 multiple-domain amnestic MCI subjects (MCI-MD), and 68 normal control subjects were assessed with the Florida Affect Battery. Results: After adjustment for age and gender, analyses of performance across the facial affect processing subtests of the Florida Affect Battery demonstrated intact performance in the single-domain MCI group but significantly impaired performance in the MCI-MD group, particularly on a test of facial affect discrimination. Within the MCI-MD group, men performed disproportionately worse than women. Performance on facial affect discriminations in the ...
Open Journal of Medical Psychology, 2014
Difficulties in recognizing emotional signals might have serious implications for social interactions. Neurodegenerative diseases that affect neural networks involved in emotional displays processing might thus be connected with a disproportionate impairment in social life. This study aimed at examining the ability to decode basic emotions from dynamic visual displays in mild to moderate dementia. Thirty old adults diagnosed as demented, and 30 gender-matched healthy controls were administered a measure of emotion evaluation. The groups did not differ significantly in age and educational level. The emotion evaluation test was designed to examine a person's ability to visually identify basic emotions and discriminate these from neutral expressions, when they were expressed as dynamic, subtle, day-to-day expressions. Results showed that demented participants had a great difficulty in recognizing the positively valenced emotions of happiness and pleasant surprise, while sadness, anger, and anxiety were the easiest emotions to recognize. Healthy controls were almost excellent on happiness recognition, while discrimination of non-emotional displays was the most difficult condition often mislabeled as anxiety or pleasant surprise. Results were mainly discussed in terms of socio-emotional selectivity theory positing that only older adults capable of exerting cognitive controlled favor emotional over non-emotional and positive over negative information.
Emotion processing for arousal and neutral content in Alzheimer's disease
International journal of Alzheimer's disease, 2009
Objective. To assess the ability of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients to perceive emotional information and to assign subjective emotional rating scores to audiovisual presentations. Materials and Methods. 24 subjects (14 with AD, matched to controls for age and educational levels) were studied. After neuropsychological assessment, they watched a Neutral story and then a story with Emotional content. Results. Recall scores for both stories were significantly lower in AD (Neutral and Emotional: P = .001). CG assigned different emotional scores for each version of the test, P = .001, while ratings of AD did not differ, P = .32. Linear regression analyses determined the best predictors of emotional rating and recognition memory for each group among neuropsychological tests battery. Conclusions. AD patients show changes in emotional processing on declarative memory and a preserved ability to express emotions in face of arousal content. The present findings suggest that these impairm...
Aging and disease, 2015
Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been largely characterized by severe deterioration of cognitive functioning. Only recently has more attention been shifted to identifying the preserved capacity and functioning of AD patients. By reviewing the AD literature, we observe that despite the various cognitive impairment and deficits, early Alzheimer's patients perform certain types of automatic emotion regulation and display a positivity effect in emotion recognition and emotional memory. Moreover, we argue that, like their healthy aged peers, the optimization of such preserved emotion-based capacities helps early AD patients increase positive emotions, which may counteract the negative effects of the disease, thus maintaining their socio-emotional functioning. Finally, we discuss the emotion-based capacities strategies that AD patients may use to facilitate their adjustment to a life with Alzheimer's.