Emotional Processing in Healthy Ageing, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Emotional processing, particularly facial expression recognition, is essential for social cognition, and dysfunction may be associated with poor cognitive health. In pathological ageing conditions, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which cognitive impairments are present, disturbed emotional processing and difficulty with social interactions have been documented. However, it is unclear how pathological ageing affects emotional processing and human social behaviour. The aim of this study is to provide insight into how emotional processing is affected in MCI and AD and whether this capacity can constitute a differentiating factor allowing the preclinical diagnosis of both diseases. For this purpose, an ecological emotional battery adapted from five subsets of the Florida Affect Battery was used. Given that emotion may not be separated from cognition, the affect battery was divided into subtests according to cognitive demand, resulting in three blocks. Our results showed that individuals with MCI or AD had poorer performance on the emotional processing tasks, although with different patterns, than that of controls. Cognitive demand may be responsible for the execution patterns of different emotional processing tests. Tasks with moderate cognitive demand are the most sensitive for discriminating between two cognitive impairment entities. In summary, emotional processing tasks may aid in characterising the neurocognitive deficits in MCI or AD. Additionally, identifying these deficits may be useful for developing interventions that specifically target these emotional processing problems.

Exploring longitudinal changes in implicit awareness of dementia: An investigation of the emotional Stroop effect in healthy ageing and mild dementia

“…It is however unclear whether this is due to an underlying decline in cognition or to a change in emotional processing. Changes in emotional processing are related to cognitive decline in dementia (Albert et al, 1991; Bucks & Radford, 2004; Cárdenas et al, 2021; Koff et al, 1999), although levels of awareness of emotional state appear similar in a group of people with mild dementia and a group of people with moderate dementia, with only a minimal decrease in awareness shown by the moderate dementia group (Lacerda et al, 2020). In the present study as responding was not related to MMSE score it is possible that explicit emotional responses, of the kind typically used to investigate emotional processes in dementia, are distinct from implicit responses investigated by the emotional Stroop for dementia‐relevant words.…”

The role of neuropeptides (oxytocin, vasopressin, neuropeptide S) in the development of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease

“…Все это приводит к нарушению социального познания и трудностям в социальном взаимодействии (рис. Большинство исследований сосредоточено на оценке когнитивных функций, но оценка психоэмоциональных нарушений может быть чувствительным методом для исследования клинического состояния при БА, что может повлечь за собой внедрение новых и эффективных способов лечения [20]. Существуют крупные исследования, результаты которых подтверждают эффективность психосоциальных вмешательств для замедления прогрессирования когнитивных нарушений у пациентов с БА.…”

Emotion Processing Dysfunction in Alzheimer’s Disease: An Overview of Behavioral Findings, Systems Neural Correlates, and Underlying Neural Biology

“…76 Increasingly impaired emotion discrimination (e.g., facial emotion discrimination in memory tasks on facial emotional cues) with increased cognitive complexity of task in AD associates diminished EEE with AD pathology. 77 Task repetitions, shorter time delay in recollection, higher emotional load (intensity), and self-reference of the stimuli benefit AD patients in manifesting EEE.…”