Preserved recognition and selection of facial expression of happiness in mild Alzheimer’s Disease

Moradi, Zahra; Najlerahim, Abdolrahman; Humphreys, Glyn W.

doi:10.15761/adcn.1000119

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…The discrepancy in relation to previous findings might stem from differences in sample characteristics or from differences in methods. Expressions of happiness and disgust are often easier to recognize than those of fear and sadness and sometimes even associated with ceiling effects (e.g., McCade et al, 2011;Moradi, Najlerahim, & Humphreys;2018;Richard-Mornas et al, 2012;Spoletini et al, 2008;Weiss et al, 2008), and this could have masked group differences in previous work. Our stimuli were selected so that they would elicit intermediate levels of performance, and this might have made our tasks more sensitive to a wider range of impairments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired Recognition of Facial and Vocal Emotions in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Moreira

Costa

Machado

et al. 2021

J Int Neuropsychol Soc

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Objective: 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.

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