Emotion Evaluation and Social Inference Impairments in Huntington’s Disease

Abstract

These findings suggest that social cognitive difficulties in symptomatic HD may be underpinned by more generalised impairments, related to deciphering social exchanges, as opposed to a selective theory of mind deficit. Such difficulties have the potential to place significant strain on interpersonal relationships, and thus warrant thorough clinical assessment, using ecologically-valid tools, to promote early detection and development of person-centred interventions.

Emotion Recognition Correlates With Social-Neuropsychiatric Dysfunction in Huntington’s Disease

“…Unlike standard static emotion recognition tasks, TASIT provides multiple sources of emotional information including from the face, voice, and other nonverbal domains. TASIT is reliable and ecologically valid and has been used to classify and describe social-cognitive impairments in HD (Larsen et al, 2016;Philpott et al, 2016) We administered the shortened Part 1 (Emotion Evaluation Test) of TASIT, in which participants view 14 short video vignettes of professional actors depicting various social scenarios or interactions and then select the emotion being conveyed by one of the actors in the scene, from a list of response options; "happy", "surprise", "neutral", "sad", "angry", "anxious", or "revolted." Two vignettes per emotion type are presented.…”

“…The short-form TASIT data for 17 participants were derived from baseline assessments in an efficacy study of computerized emotion recognition remediation in premanifest and early-symptomatic HD (Kempnich et al, 2017). The shortform TASIT, and family-rated FrSBe data from 15 participants with symptomatic HD have been previously reported elsewhere (Philpott et al, 2016).…”

“…E-mail: Julie.Stout@monash.edu These emotion recognition deficits affect the ability for people with premanifest and "manifest" (post-clinical diagnosis phase) HD to recognize negative emotions including anger, disgust, fear, and sadness (for a review see Henley et al, 2012), and may contribute to social dysfunction. While most research characterizing emotion recognition deficits in HD have used "static" tasks, removed of contextual and other emotional cues, more recent evidence demonstrates that people with manifest HD are also impaired for recognizing emotion from "dynamic" tasks in which multiple sources of emotional information are provided (Larsen, Vinther-Jensen, Gade, Nielsen, & Vogel, 2016;Philpott, Andrews, Staios, Churchyard, & Fisher, 2016). Emotion recognition refers to a broad set of social cognitive skills that enable interpretation of emotional or affective information from visual, auditory, and even olfactory inputs, for example, scenes, facial expressions, body posture, and even odors, such as disgusting smells.…”

<p>Neurocognitive mechanisms of theory of mind impairment in neurodegeneration: a transdiagnostic approach</p>

“…This includes basic affective tasks of decoding emotions from visual cues (RMET),108,109 attributing emotions to story characters,108 as well as low demand cognitive tasks such as ascribing mental states to animated shapes (Frith–Happé animations)110 and spatial perspective taking 111. More complex measures encompassing both cognitive and affective elements are also impaired in HD, including faux pas detection,111,112 making social inferences (TASIT),108,113 understanding the thoughts and feelings of cartoon characters (Happé cartoons),29 and attributing intentions to others 114,115. Unlike other neurodegenerative disorders, ToM performance is closely linked to executive function in HD, with consistent correlations between ToM impairments and executive function emerging across all the aforementioned studies.…”

Therapeutic Use of Music, Dance, and Rhythmic Auditory Cueing for Patients with Huntington’s Disease: A Systematic Review

“…Striatal neuropathology is associated with cognitive and psychiatric functions [8][9][10] that often precede motor deficits [8][9][10][11][12]. Cognitive impairments are observed in executive function, memory, affective processing, and psychomotor speed [7,[13][14][15]. Psychiatric symptoms, including irritability, depression, anxiety, apathy, disinhibition, and emotion dysregulation, are common in HD [16][17][18][19].…”