Emotion recognition in early Parkinsons disease and its relation with cognitive functioning

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

Buenos Aires

Congreso; International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders; 2010

The International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society (MDS)

Objectives. The goal of this study was to investigate emotion recognition in a cohort of early diagnosed Parkinson disease and to investigate its relationship with medication and with cognitive functioning. Background. Due to the fact that the neural correlates of emotion recognition are involved in Parkinson Disease (PD) pathology, emotion recognition in this disease is now becoming an important subject of study. Even though emotion recognition deficits have already been reported, there is contradictory evidence regarding the specificity of those deficits. While some authors have described specific deficits in anger, others have found deficits in other emotions such as disgust. The differences between these studies may be related to the variability of tasks and the lack of control of confounding factors such as medication or overall cognitive ability Methods. We compared the performance of patients with early PD receiving medication (n = 13), patients with early PD receiving no medication (n = 15), and matched healthy controls (n =9) with an emotion recognition test and a complete neuropsychological battery. The experimental task used in this study was the Emotion Hexagon Task. Patients were also assessed with a test of recognition of famous faces to control for face processing and with a complete cognitive battery. Results. Significant differences between PD patients (both medicated and unmedicated) and normal controls were found on the recognition of most emotions assessed, including faces portraying happiness, surprise, anger, fear and sadness. When performance was compared between PD patients with and without dopaminergic medication, no significant differences were found. Within the patient group, significant correlations were found between the emotion hexagon total score and cognitive performance measured by tests of attention, memory, executive functions and language. Conclusions. Significant differences were found on the capacity to recognize facial emotions in patients with early Parkinson disease. The failure in the emotion recognition may be related to performance in other cognitive tasks.