The Effects of Different Attentional Demands in the Identification of Emotional Facial Expressions in Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by the progressive impairment of mental and emotional functions, including the processing of emotional facial expression (EFE). Deficits in decoding EFE are relevant in social contexts in which information from 2 or more sources may be processed simultaneously. To assess the role of contextual stimuli on EFE processing in AD, we analyzed the ability of patients with AD and healthy elderly adults to identify EFE when simultaneously performing another task. Each of the 6 basic EFEs was presented to 15 patients with AD and 35 controls in a dual task paradigm that is in parallel with a visuospatial or a semantic task. Results show that the decoding of EFEs was impaired in patients with AD when they were simultaneously processing additional visuospatial information, yet not when they were performed in conjunction with a semantic task. These findings suggest that the capacity to interpret emotional states is impaired in AD.

Emotional processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment: The influence of the valence and intensity of emotional stimuli

“…With regards elderly subjects with MCI, the pattern is conspicuously distinct to that of the healthy group of individuals, which seems to indicate the influence of cognitive capacity on the identification of basic emotions. We believe that this data supports the most recent theories on the processing of EFEs indicating that these deficits are not exclusively due to sub-cortical damage but also, and perhaps more significantly, due the cortical dysfunction that occurs with age, especially when individuals are in the prodromic stage of a neurodegenerative disease [37][38][39].…”

“…The data presented here also seem to support the hypothesis that emotional processing is crucial in attentional resource intervention [39], providing empirical evidence of the importance of the integrity of cognitive capacity in each individual when processing emotional expressions. This is especially relevant from the theoretical point of view, as it confirms that attentional resources are crucial in emotional processing, and consequently, that they control such processing [35,36].…”

“…There are two variables that define this complexity: (1) the facial information that characterizes each basic emotion; and (2) the intensity to which the emotion can be manifested. EFEs with negative valence are generally more difficult to identify [39,40], possibly because they are more complex from a behavioral standpoint than stimuli like happiness, requiring more actions or facial muscle movements according to the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) [41][42][43]. Little is known about how the intensity of expressions affects the processing of EFEs.…”

Emotional memory enhancement in respect of positive visual stimuli in Alzheimer's disease emerges after rich and deep encoding

“…During healthy ageing the volume of the amygdala remains relatively intact (Good et al, 2001), and emotional processing seems to be preserved. Healthy older participants' subjective ratings of valence and arousal (Kensinger, 2008;Kensinger, Piguet, Krendl, & Corkin, 2005) and electro-dermal responses (Denburg, Buchanan, Tranel, & Adolphs, 2003) for emotional stimuli are similar to those of healthy young participants.…”

The effects of concurrent cognitive task load on recognising faces displaying emotion

“…The number of target sounds that they have to count can be varied, hence, increasing the cognitive load of the task and allowing some control over the degree of load present, rather than just its presence or absence as in Experiment 1. Moreover, there has been some debate in related studies regarding whether purely verbal (semantic) or non-verbal (non-semantic) load impacts recognition of whole faces(Garcia-Rodriguez, Vincent, Casares-Guillen, Ellgring, & Frank, 2012). The adoption of a non-verbal load, as in this experiment, may extend the generality of the current findings.…”