Congratulations to Antonia and Pilar for their latest publication on facial emotional recognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease. the study will be published in Neuropsychology.
The study compared patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and control participants in a task measuring the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. The results suggests that patients with PD present with a relative deficit in the recognition of emotions from facial expressions and that this deficit is related to an alteration of inhibitory functions.
Reference: Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022). Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: the role of executive and affective domains. Neuropsychology, in press.
Abstract: Objective. The ability to recognize emotions from facial expression (FER) may be impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We aimed to explore FER in PD patients by using a dynamic presentation of emotions across different intensities and to examine the extent to which executive and affective alterations contributed to FER deficits. Methods. Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls were assessed on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). FER performance was tested for correlations and regression analyses with affective and neuropsychological tests to identify and quantify which factors best predicted ERT accuracy. Results . PD patients showed poorer performance on the ERT, specifically on angry expressions, but they benefited from increased intensity as much as controls did. Differences were also found for apathy, depression and executive tests, especially in the inhibition domain. Importantly, differences between groups on the ERT disappeared when controlling for inhibition and the affective symptoms. A significant effect of inhibition dysfunction was also observed on the ERT performance. Conclusions . Our findings demonstrate the presence of emotion recognition deficits of morphed facial expressions in patients with PD. Moreover, they suggest that inhibition dysfunctions may act as an important factor negatively influencing FER. The present study highlights the complex nature of emotion processing and its relation with emotional-affective