Emotional Processing in Healthy Ageing, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer’s Disease (original) (raw)
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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)
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 ...
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...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
The identification of basic emotions plays an important role in social relationships and behaviors linked to survival. In neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the ability to recognize emotions may already be impaired at early stages of the disease, such as the stage of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). However, as regards vascular pathologies related to cognitive impairment, very little is known about emotion recognition in people bearing vascular risk factors (VRF). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine emotion recognition ability in the health continuum “healthy advancing age—advancing age with VRF—MCI”. The sample consisted of 106 adults divided in three diagnostic groups; 43 adults with MCI, 41 adults bearing one or more VRF, and 22 healthy controls of advancing age (HC). Since HC were more educated and younger than the other two groups, the age-group and level of educational were taken into account in the statistical analyses. A dynamic...
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...
International Psychogeriatrics, 2015
Background: Deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER) have been shown to substantially impair several aspects in everyday life of affected individuals (e.g. social functioning). Presently, we aim at assessing differences in emotion recognition performance in three patient groups suffering from mild forms of cognitive impairment compared to healthy controls. Methods: Performance on a concise emotion recognition test battery (VERT-K) of 68 patients with subjective cognitive decline (SCD), 44 non-amnestic (non-aMCI), and 25 amnestic patients (aMCI) with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was compared with an age-equivalent sample of 138 healthy controls all of which were recruited within the framework of the Vienna Conversion to Dementia Study. Additionally, patients and controls underwent individual assessment using a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery examining attention, executive functioning, language, and memory (NTBV), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and a measure of premorbid IQ (WST). Results: Type of diagnosis showed a significant effect on emotion recognition performance, indicating progressively deteriorating results as severity of diagnosis increased. Between-groups effect sizes were substantial, showing non-trivial effects in all comparisons (Cohen's ds from −0.30 to −0.83) except for SCD versus controls. Moreover, emotion recognition performance was higher in women and positively associated with premorbid IQ. Conclusions: Our findings indicate substantial effects of progressive neurological damage on emotion recognition in patients. Importantly, emotion recognition deficits were observable in non-amnestic patients as well, thus conceivably suggesting associations between decreased recognition performance and global cognitive decline. Premorbid IQ appears to act as protective factor yielding lesser deficits in patients showing higher IQs.
Impaired Recognition of Facial and Vocal Emotions in Mild Cognitive Impairment
Journal of The International Neuropsychological Society, 2021
The ability to recognize others' emotions is a central aspect of socioemotional functioning. Emotion recognition impairments are well documented in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, but it is less understood whether they are also present in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Results on facial emotion recognition are mixed, and crucially, it remains unclear whether the potential impairments are specific to faces or extend across sensory modalities, Method: In the current study, 32 MCI patients and 33 cognitively intact controls completed a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and two forced-choice emotion recognition tasks, including visual and auditory stimuli. The emotion recognition tasks required participants to categorize emotions in facial expressions and in nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying) expressing neutrality, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasure, surprise, or sadness. Results: MCI patients performed worse than controls for both facial expressions and vocalizations. The effect was large, similar across tasks and individual emotions, and it was not explained by sensory losses or affective symptomatology. Emotion recognition impairments were more pronounced among patients with lower global cognitive performance, but they did not correlate with the ability to perform activities of daily living. Conclusions: These findings indicate that MCI is associated with emotion recognition difficulties and that such difficulties extend beyond vision, plausibly reflecting a failure at supramodal levels of emotional processing. This highlights the importance of considering emotion recognition abilities as part of standard neuropsychological testing in MCI, and as a target of interventions aimed at improving social cognition in these patients.