Emotion recognition in early Parkinson’s disease and its relation with cognitive functioning

MARÍA ROCA; TERESA TORRALVA; ANABEL CHADE; OSCAR GERSHANIK; ARÉVALO GONZALO; FACUNDO MANES

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 14th International Congress of Parkinson´s Disease and Movement Disorders; 2010

The Movement Disorder Society

Background: Due to the fact that the neural basis of emotion recognition are implied in Parkinson Disease (PD) pathology, emotion recognition in this disease is now becoming an important subject of study. Different studies of emotion recognition in PD has shown contradictory evidence, probably because of the variability of tasks and tasks difficulty, the lack of documentation of clinical variables (stage and duration of the disease) and the lack of importance given to the presence of concomitant cognitive deficits or medication effects. Objectives The goal of this investigation was to study emotion recognition in a cohort of early diagnosed Parkinson disease with a task that assesses emotion recognition with different levels of difficulty. Methods We compared 19 early PD patients with healthy matched controls (N=8) with the Emotion Hexagon Task. This test contains morphed continua pictures ranging between the following six expression pairs: happiness–surprise, surprise–fear, fear–sadness, sadness–disgust, disgust–anger, anger–happiness. Patients were also assessed with a test of recognition of famous faces and with a complete cognitive battery that included tests of attention, memory, visuoperceptual abilities and executive functions. Results Significant differences between PD and normal controls were found in the recognition of anger, fear and sadness faces presenting more difficulties in recognizing more ambiguous pictures. Differences could not be explained for the presence of other cognitive deficits or the use of dopaminergic drugs.