Comparison of Emotion Recognition in Young People, Healthy Older Adults, and Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

Background: The basic discrete emotions, namely, happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise, and sadness, are present across different cultures and societies. Facial emotion recognition is crucial in social interactions, but normal and pathological aging seem to affect this ability. The present research aims to identify the differences in the capacity for recognition of the six basic discrete emotions between young and older healthy controls (HOC) and mildly cognitively impaired patients (MCI). Method: The sample (N = 107) consisted of 47 young adults, 27 healthy older adults, and 33 MCI patients. Several neuropsychological scales were administered to assess the cognitive state of the participants, followed by the emotional labeling task on the Ekman 60 Faces test. Results: The MANOVA analysis was significant and revealed the presence of differences in the emotion recognition abilities of the groups. Compared to HOC, the MCI group obtained a significantly lower number of hits on fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise. The happiness emotion recognition rate did not differ significantly among the three groups. Surprisingly, young people and HOC did not show significant differences. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that MCI was associated with facial emotion recognition impairment, whereas normal aging did not seem to affect this ability.

Effect of emotional stimulus on response inhibition in people with mild cognitive impairment: an event-related potential study

“…Some studies have confirmed that emotion regulation is impaired in MCI (Bora and Yener, 2017;Liu et al, 2022), mainly focusing on negative emotions and that the recognition of positive faces, such as joy, happiness, and hope, is no different from healthy older adults (McCade et al, 2013;Elferink et al, 2015;Barbieri et al, 2022). This seems to suggest that MCI retains the "positive effect. "…”

“…Some studies have confirmed that emotion regulation is impaired in MCI ( Bora and Yener, 2017 ; Liu et al, 2022 ), mainly focusing on negative emotions and that the recognition of positive faces, such as joy, happiness, and hope, is no different from healthy older adults ( McCade et al, 2013 ; Elferink et al, 2015 ; Barbieri et al, 2022 ). This seems to suggest that MCI retains the “positive effect.” In addition, based on scholars’ proposal of the dual competition models, it is known that emotions and cognitions compete with each other, and the process largely depends on attentional capture ( Pessoa, 2009 ).…”