Emotion recognition in Early Parkinson Disease

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

Buenos Aires

Encuentro; Join Mid-Year Meeting; 2008

The International Neuropsychological Society, Sociedad de Neuropsicología de Argentina

Objective: 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 have shown contradictory evidence, probably because of the variability of tasks and tasks difficulty, the lack of documentation of clinical variables (stage and duration fo the disease) an the lack of importance given to the present of concomitant cognitive deficits or medications effects. 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. Partipants and Methods: We compared 19 early PD patients with healthy matched controls (n=8) with the Emotion Hexageon Task. This test contains morphed continua pictures ranging between the following six expression paris: happiness-surprise, surprise-fear, fear-sadness, sadness-disgust, disgust-anger, anger-happiness. Patients were also assesses 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 recognizin of anger, fear and sadness faces presenting more difficulties in recognizing more ambiguous pictures. Conclusions: differences could not be explained for the presence of other cognitive deficits or the use of dopaminergic drugs.