Facial emotion recognition and its relationship to cognition and depressive symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 1165-1179 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Pietschnig ◽  
L. Schröder ◽  
I. Ratheiser ◽  
I. Kryspin-Exner ◽  
M. Pflüger ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTBackground:Impairments in facial emotion recognition (FER) have been detected in patients with Parkinson disease (PD). Presently, we aim at assessing differences in emotion recognition performance in PD patient groups with and without mild forms of cognitive impairment (MCI) compared to healthy controls.Methods:Performance on a concise emotion recognition test battery (VERT-K) of three groups of 97 PD patients was compared with an age-equivalent sample of 168 healthy controls. Patients were categorized into groups according to two well-established classifications of MCI according to Petersen's (cognitively intact vs. amnestic MCI, aMCI, vs. non-amnestic MCI, non-aMCI) and Litvan's (cognitively intact vs. single-domain MCI, sMCI, vs. multi-domain MCI, mMCI) criteria. Patients and controls underwent individual assessments using a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery examining attention, executive functioning, language, and memory (Neuropsychological Test Battery Vienna, NTBV), the Beck Depression Inventory, and a measure of premorbid IQ (WST).Results:Cognitively intact PD patients and patients with MCI in PD (PD-MCI) showed significantly worse emotion recognition performance when compared to healthy controls. Between-groups effect sizes were substantial, showing non-trivial effects in all comparisons (Cohen's ds from 0.31 to 1.22). Moreover, emotion recognition performance was higher in women, positively associated with premorbid IQ and negatively associated with age. Depressive symptoms were not related to FER.Conclusions:The present investigation yields further evidence for impaired FER in PD. Interestingly, our data suggest FER deficits even in cognitively intact PD patients indicating FER dysfunction prior to the development of overt cognitive dysfunction. Age showed a negative association whereas IQ showed a positive association with FER.

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Pietschnig ◽  
R. Aigner-Wöber ◽  
N. Reischenböck ◽  
I. Kryspin-Exner ◽  
D. Moser ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTBackground: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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (08) ◽  
pp. 884-889 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally A. Grace ◽  
Wei Lin Toh ◽  
Ben Buchanan ◽  
David J. Castle ◽  
Susan L. Rossell

Abstract Objectives: Patients with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) have difficulty in recognising facial emotions, and there is evidence to suggest that there is a specific deficit in identifying negative facial emotions, such as sadness and anger. Methods: This study investigated facial emotion recognition in 19 individuals with BDD compared with 21 healthy control participants who completed a facial emotion recognition task, in which they were asked to identify emotional expressions portrayed in neutral, happy, sad, fearful, or angry faces. Results: Compared to the healthy control participants, the BDD patients were generally less accurate in identifying all facial emotions but showed specific deficits for negative emotions. The BDD group made significantly more errors when identifying neutral, angry, and sad faces than healthy controls; and were significantly slower at identifying neutral, angry, and happy faces. Conclusions: These findings add to previous face-processing literature in BDD, suggesting deficits in identifying negative facial emotions. There are treatment implications as future interventions would do well to target such deficits.


2013 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Lázaro ◽  
Imanol Amayra ◽  
Juan Francisco López-Paz ◽  
Amaia Jometón ◽  
Natalia Martín ◽  
...  

AbstractThe assessment of facial expression is an important aspect of a clinical neurological examination, both as an indicator of a mood disorder and as a sign of neurological damage. To date, although studies have been conducted on certain psychosocial aspects of myasthenia, such as quality of life and anxiety, and on neuropsychological aspects such as memory, no studies have directly assessed facial emotion recognition accuracy. The aim of this study was to assess the facial emotion recognition accuracy (fear, surprise, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust), empathy, and reaction time of patients with myasthenia. Thirty-five patients with myasthenia and 36 healthy controls were tested for their ability to differentiate emotional facial expressions. Participants were matched with respect to age, gender, and education level. Their ability to differentiate emotional facial expressions was evaluated using the computer-based program Feel Test. The data showed that myasthenic patients scored significantly lower (p < 0.05) than healthy controls in the total Feel score, fear, surprise, and higher reaction time. The findings suggest that the ability to recognize facial affect may be reduced in individuals with myasthenia.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazire Duran ◽  
ANTHONY P. ATKINSON

Certain facial features provide useful information for recognition of facial expressions. In two experiments, we investigated whether foveating informative features of briefly presented expressions improves recognition accuracy and whether these features are targeted reflexively when not foveated. Angry, fearful, surprised, and sad or disgusted expressions were presented briefly at locations which would ensure foveation of specific features. Foveating the mouth of fearful, surprised and disgusted expressions improved emotion recognition compared to foveating an eye or cheek or the central brow. Foveating the brow lead to equivocal results in anger recognition across the two experiments, which might be due to the different combination of emotions used. There was no consistent evidence suggesting that reflexive first saccades targeted emotion-relevant features; instead, they targeted the closest feature to initial fixation. In a third experiment, angry, fearful, surprised and disgusted expressions were presented for 5 seconds. Duration of task-related fixations in the eyes, brow, nose and mouth regions was modulated by the presented expression. Moreover, longer fixation at the mouth positively correlated with anger and disgust accuracy both when these expressions were freely viewed (Experiment 3) and when briefly presented at the mouth (Experiment 2). Finally, an overall preference to fixate the mouth across all expressions correlated positively with anger and disgust accuracy. These findings suggest that foveal processing of informative features is functional/contributory to emotion recognition, but they are not automatically sought out when not foveated, and that facial emotion recognition performance is related to idiosyncratic gaze behaviour.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. e0260814
Author(s):  
Nazire Duran ◽  
Anthony P. Atkinson

Certain facial features provide useful information for recognition of facial expressions. In two experiments, we investigated whether foveating informative features of briefly presented expressions improves recognition accuracy and whether these features are targeted reflexively when not foveated. Angry, fearful, surprised, and sad or disgusted expressions were presented briefly at locations which would ensure foveation of specific features. Foveating the mouth of fearful, surprised and disgusted expressions improved emotion recognition compared to foveating an eye or cheek or the central brow. Foveating the brow led to equivocal results in anger recognition across the two experiments, which might be due to the different combination of emotions used. There was no consistent evidence suggesting that reflexive first saccades targeted emotion-relevant features; instead, they targeted the closest feature to initial fixation. In a third experiment, angry, fearful, surprised and disgusted expressions were presented for 5 seconds. Duration of task-related fixations in the eyes, brow, nose and mouth regions was modulated by the presented expression. Moreover, longer fixation at the mouth positively correlated with anger and disgust accuracy both when these expressions were freely viewed (Experiment 2b) and when briefly presented at the mouth (Experiment 2a). Finally, an overall preference to fixate the mouth across all expressions correlated positively with anger and disgust accuracy. These findings suggest that foveal processing of informative features is functional/contributory to emotion recognition, but they are not automatically sought out when not foveated, and that facial emotion recognition performance is related to idiosyncratic gaze behaviour.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 424-424
Author(s):  
S. Komlosi ◽  
G. Csukly ◽  
G. Stefanics ◽  
I. Czigler ◽  
P. Czobor

IntroductionWhile deficits in facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia have consistently been shown, the underlying neuronal mechanisms remain unclear. Electrophysiological measures, such as event-related brain potentials related to facial emotion recognition yield insight into the time course of recognizing emotional faces.ObjectivesIn our study we aimed to delineate the neurophysiological correlates of facial emotion recognition and to investigate where, when, and what components in the course of emotional information processing show impairment in schizophrenia.MethodologyWe collected data using a 128-channel EEG recording system for testing an experimental facial emotion recognition paradigm with 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 matched healthy controls. Subjects were presented fearful and neutral emotional facial expressions on a monitor and asked to make decisions via a button press relating to either the gender or the emotion of the presented face.ResultsOur findings revealed that ERPs of pateints with schizophrenia significantly differed from those of matched healthy controls in several components and areas characteristic to facial emotion processing, showing differences in both early and late ERP components of emotional face processing. Significant main effects of task (gender vs emotion) and emotion (fear vs neutral) were also found.ConclusionThe finding that patients with schizophrenia, as compared to healthy controls, show differences in emotional face processing in several cortical areas and time intervals underlines the hypotheses that a deficit in affect recognition may originate from the impairment of a distributed facial emotion recognition network, including both early perceptual and later phases of facial emotion processing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-60
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Carrà ◽  
Giulia Brambilla ◽  
Manuela Caslini ◽  
Francesca Parma ◽  
Alessandro Chinello ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectivesSince evidence on executive control among women with Anorexia or Bulimia Nervosa (AN/BN) are somehow inconclusive, we aimed to explore whether performance in set-shifting in AN/BN might be influenced by Facial Emotion Recognition (FER).MethodsWe randomly recruited women with a diagnosis of AN or BN, from an Eating Disorders Outpatient Clinic in Italy, as well as healthy controls (HCs). We evaluated with established tools: diagnosis (Eating Disorder Examination- EDE-17.0), executive control (Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift-IED) and FER (Ekman 60 Faces Test-EK-60F). Univariate distributions by diagnostic subgroups were assessed on sociodemographic and clinical variables, which were selected for subsequent multiple linear regression analyses.ResultsWomen with AN performed significantly worse than HCs on IED adjusted total errors. HCs scored significantly better than AN and BN on EK-60F fear subscale. Although IED set shifting was associated (p = 0.008) with AN, after controlling for age, EK-60F fear subscale, alexithymia and depression (i.e., clinically relevant covariates identified a priori from the literature, or associated with AN/BN at univariate level), this association could not be confirmed.ConclusionsImpaired executive control may not be a distinctive feature in women with AN, since several clinical characteristics, including fear recognition ability, are likely to have an important role. This has significant implications for relevant interventions in AN, which should aim at also improving socio-emotional processing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-263
Author(s):  
Gill Terrett ◽  
Kimberly Mercuri ◽  
Elizabeth Pizarro-Campagna ◽  
Laila Hugrass ◽  
H Valerie Curran ◽  
...  

Background: Long-term opiate users experience pervasive social difficulties, but there has been surprisingly limited research focused on social-cognitive functioning in this population. Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate whether three important aspects of social cognition (facial emotion recognition, theory of mind (ToM) and rapid facial mimicry) differ between long-term opiate users and healthy controls. Methods: The participants were 25 long-term opiate users who were enrolled in opiate substitution programmes, and 25 healthy controls. Facial emotion recognition accuracy was indexed by responses to 60 photographs of faces depicting the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust). ToM was assessed using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task, which requires participants to infer mental states of others from partial facial cues. Rapid facial mimicry was assessed by recording activity in the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscle regions while participants passively viewed images of happy and angry facial expressions. Results: Relative to the control group, the opiate user group exhibited deficits in both facial emotion recognition and ToM. Moreover, only control participants exhibited typical rapid facial mimicry responses to happy facial expressions. Conclusions: These data indicate that long-term opiate users exhibit abnormalities in three distinct areas of social-cognitive processing, pointing to the need for additional work to establish how social-cognitive functioning relates to functional outcomes in this group. Such work may ultimately inform the development of interventions aimed at improving treatment outcomes for long-term opiate users.


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