Regular Research ArticleEmotion-Discrimination Deficits in Mild Alzheimer Disease
Section snippets
Subjects
Persons with AD (N = 20; M:F = 11:9) and healthy Caretakers (N = 22; M:F = 9:13) were recruited through the Alzheimer Disease Center (ADC) at the University of Pennsylvania. For participation in this study, inclusion criteria for AD subjects were 1) clinical symptoms consistent with the diagnosis of probable AD; 2) mild severity of functional impairment, as rated on the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR);25 3) fluency in English and a reading level ≥6th grade; 4) lack of medical illness that
RESULTS
On the Emotion Recognition Test (ER40), AD patients differed from Caretakers and were impaired in recognition of all emotions and neutral faces combined (z = −3.67; p <0.001). When compared by emotion, AD patients were impaired for Happy (z = −2.94; p = 0.003), Sad (z = −2.96; p = 0.003), and Fearful (z = −3.28; p = 0.001), but not Angry (z = −1.32; p = 0.19) and Neutral (z = −1.80; p = 0.072) faces (Table 3). When adjusted for overall cognition, however, the results did not remain significant.
CONCLUSIONS
Our study compared emotion-discrimination in community-based persons with mild AD and their caretakers. Overall, AD subjects were able to identify the target emotion in the majority of presentations, indicating decreased, but not absent, abilities of emotion-discrimination. Recognition of specific emotions was diminished for happy, sad, fearful and neutral faces, but not for anger. Recognition of emotions in Caretakers was similar to what we have reported previously in younger control-groups,
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This work was previously presented at the Psychiatry Research Society Meeting, February 11–14, 2004, in Park City, UT.
The work was supported by NIMH grants MH-01839 and NIA P30-AG010124.