Affiliations: Department of Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz
Instituut, Utrecht University, The Netherlands | Department of Neurology, University Medical Center,
Utrecht, The Netherlands | Department of Psychiatry, Radboud University Medical
Centre Nijmegen, The Netherlands | Neurologische Klinik und Poliklinik,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany | Klinik und Poliklinik für Psychiatrie der TU
München, Germany
Note: [] Corresponding author: Dr. R.P.C. Kessels, Helmholtz Instituut,
Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2,
3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31302533651; Fax: +31302534511;
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: Behavioural problems are a key feature of frontotemporal lobar
degeneration (FTLD). Also, FTLD patients show impairments in emotion
processing. Specifically, the perception of negative emotional facial
expressions is affected. Generally, however, negative emotional expressions are
regarded as more difficult to recognize than positive ones, which thus may have
been a confounding factor in previous studies. Also, ceiling effects are often
present on emotion recognition tasks using full-blown emotional facial
expressions. In the present study with FTLD patients, we examined the
perception of sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and disgust at
different emotional intensities on morphed facial expressions to take task
difficulty into account. Results showed that our FTLD patients were
specifically impaired at the recognition of the emotion anger. Also, the
patients performed worse than the controls on recognition of surprise, but
performed at control levels on disgust, happiness, sadness and fear. These
findings corroborate and extend previous results showing deficits in emotion
perception in FTLD.
Keywords: Frontotemporal lobar degeneration, dementia, emotion, facial expression, face recognition
