The present study aimed to investigate changes in facial expression recognition across the lifespan, as well as to determine the influence of fluid intelligence, processing speed, and memory on this ability. Peak performance in the ability to identify facial affect was found to occur in middle-age, with the children and older adults performing the poorest. Specifically, older adults were impaired in their ability to identify fear, sadness, and happiness, but had preserved recognition of anger, disgust, and surprise. Analyses investigating the influence of cognition on emotion recognition demonstrated that cognitive abilities contribute to performance, especially for participants over age 45. However, the cognitive functions did not fully account for the older adults' impairments on expression recognition. Overall, the age-related deficits in facial expression recognition have implications for older adults' use of non-verbal communicative information.
Objective
Individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) often have impaired awareness or a lack of insight into their cognitive deficits and functional abilities, especially in the later stages of the disease. Previous research has documented a relationship between depression and insight in AD, such that greater awareness of one’s disease has been associated with a higher degree of depression. However, little is known about the relationship between insight, cognitive decline, and other psychiatric or behavioral problems associated with AD.
Methods
This study included 107 outpatients who met criteria for probable AD. Instruments included the Neurobehavioral Rating Scale, the Apathy Evaluation Scale, and the MMSE. A series of hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between insight and depressed mood, anxiety, psychosis, apathy, agitation, and behavioral retardation in AD patients after controlling for cognitive skills.
Results
Insight was found to significantly predict depressed mood, anxiety, and apathy even after controlling for global cognition. Greater insight was found to be associated with depressed mood and anxiety. However, impaired insight was associated with higher levels of apathy.
Conclusion
Insight may be differentially related to mood symptoms and apathy within AD, such that patients with intact insight are more depressed, while patients with impaired insight are more apathetic. This suggests that assessment of insight in AD may complement the clinical evaluation of depression and apathy in AD and help guide the most appropriate interventions.
These findings suggest that age has the greatest impact on the recognition of the sad emotion and the greatest age effect at the 50% level of presentation across the adult life span.
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