Social perceptual function in parkinson’s disease: A meta-analysis

Abstract

Highlights  Parkinson's disease is associated with significant social perceptual impairment. The magnitude of this impairment is broadly equivalent across facial and prosodic modalities. Social perceptual impairment is evident for all six basic emotions, but is generally greater for negatively valanced emotions. Both dopaminergic medication and subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation are associated with poorer social perceptual function.

Effects of Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation on Facial Emotion Recognition in Parkinson’s Disease: A Critical Literature Review

“…The characteristics of studies assessing FER in PD patients undergone STN DBS are summarized in Table 1 . In the recent meta-analysis of Coundouris et al [ 56 ] examining social perceptual function in PD, the subanalysis concerning DBS showed that PD patients were significantly impaired in perception functions after STN DBS surgery from either facial or vocal stimuli compared to matched healthy controls (HC). The majority of studies included PD patients eligible for DBS according to standard inclusion and exclusion criteria [ 57 ], i.e., patients with idiopathic PD and severe motor disability, clear response to levodopa, occurrence of disabling levodopa-related motor complications and absence of dementia, significant neuropsychiatric disorders, and abnormalities on brain MRI.…”

“…Another issue is whether PD patients with normal FER performance before and deficit after DBS actually had a subtle FER deficit before DBS being revealed after surgery. Indeed, PD patients exhibit significant social perceptual deficits including FER impairment [ 56 , 76 ]. Areas involved in the process of recognizing emotions in faces such as the amygdala, basal ganglia, insula, the orbitofrontal, and anterior cingulate cortex are affected by PD-related pathology [ 77 ].…”

“…Gray and Tickle-Degnen [ 76 ] in their meta-analysis reported that emotion recognition impairment of PD patients was greater, although not significantly, in the hypodopaminergic state compared to the medicated state, consistent with the assumed role of dopamine in emotion regulation [ 119 ]. In contrast, Coundouris et al [ 56 ] in their meta-analysis showed that medicated PD patients had significantly greater social perceptual deficits than nonmedicated PD patients, which might be due to the dopaminergic overdose of regions involved in social perception, relatively intact from dopaminergic denervation [ 56 ]. Dopamine might therefore have beneficial effects on FER rather in the advanced stages as opposed to the early stages in which the mesocorticolimbic pathways are relatively spared [ 52 ].…”

“…Thus, there might be a lateralization favoring the right STN, in accordance with the knowledge that the right hemisphere is generally more active in emotional processing [ 148 ]. Interestingly, Coundouris et al [ 56 ] in their meta-analysis found that patients with left side PD onset, i.e., right hemisphere-driven pathology had poorer emotion recognition ability. As most studies did not examine this parameter, future research could investigate the effect of variable stimulation of the right STN on social abilities or even inactivation in specific (emotional demanding) social situations [ 66 ].…”

Empathy and Theory of Mind in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Meta-analysis

“…As this resulted in mean effects not being independent, these subcategories were not compared statistically. Instead, to interpret differences between mean effect sizes, differences in effect size magnitude, as well as the percentage of variance accounted for (PVAF) by having a diagnosis of AD versus being a control participant was referred to (see, Adams et al, 2019;Coundouris et al, 2019).…”