Social emotions in behavioral variant frontotemporal (bvftd) patients. How Ftd patients experience schadenfreude and envy

AGUSTÍN IBAÑEZ; SANTAMARIA GARCIA HERNANDO

Conferencia; XI International Conference of Frontotemporal Dementia; 2016

The study of morally-mediated emotions (including schadenfreude and envy) and their neural correlates may be critical for assessing the interaction between different emotional, social and moral processes throughout of exploration of more complex and ecological emotional situations. In this study we designed a neurodegeneration lesion model to explore the neural processing of different dimensions of moral emotions including schadenfreude and envy mediated by deservingness, moral and legal situations. We tested a group of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD n=20), a group of Alzheimer?s Disease (AD) patients (n=24) (as control for behavioral performance in dementia patients) and a group of matched healthy controls (n=20) on a novel task tracking different dimensions of moral emotions (deservingness, legal and moral) as well as a neutral condition. Results showed high scores in all schadenfreude and envy dimensions in bvFTD patients compared to healthy control group and the group of AD patients. Among dimensions, legal situations elicited higher emotional scores than deservingness and moral situations for envy and schadenfreude. Brain anatomy findings (restricted to bvFTD and controls) confirmed differences in experiencing dimensions of moral emotions. Schadenfreude scores were associated to ventral striatum in all subjects. In addition, in bvFTD patients the dimensions of schadenfreude were also negatively associated to morphology of brain areas involved in processing social-value rewards, mentalizing and social cognition (frontal pole, temporal pole, angular gyrus and precuneus). With regard to envy, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region involved in processing unfair social comparison processes, was positively associated to all dimensions of envy in all subjects. By contrast, a set of social cognitive areas including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the parahippocampus and the amygdala was negative associated to scores of envy dimensions in bvFTD patients. Together, present results supports the multidimensionality of the experience of envy and schadenfreude in healthy controls but also in patients with acknowledged social and moral deficits (bvFTD patients). Our results pave the way for analyzing more complex emotions in neuropsychiatric conditions to explore social cognition processes assuming its interaction with other cognitive, moral and emotional processes.