Fernandez-Duque Diego, Black Sandra E
Department of Psychology, Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2005;43(11):1673-87. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.01.005. Epub 2005 Mar 16.
Patients with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) have difficulties recognizing facial emotions, a deficit that may contribute to their impaired social skills. In three experiments, we investigated the FTD deficit in recognition of facial emotions, by comparing six patients with impaired social conduct, nine Alzheimer's patients, and 10 age-matched healthy adults. Experiment 1 revealed that FTD patients were impaired in the recognition of negative facial emotions. Experiment 2 replicated these findings when participants had to determine whether two faces were expressing the same or different emotions. Experiment 3 was a control study in which participants had to discriminate whether two faces were of the same sex. In this non-emotional processing task, both patient groups performed worse than normal participants, but FTD patients performed as well as Alzheimer's patients. We conclude that FTD patients are impaired in the recognition of negative facial emotions.
行为变异型额颞叶痴呆（FTD）患者在识别面部情绪方面存在困难，这一缺陷可能导致他们社交技能受损。在三项实验中，我们通过比较六名社交行为受损的患者、九名阿尔茨海默病患者和十名年龄匹配的健康成年人，研究了FTD患者在面部情绪识别方面的缺陷。实验1表明，FTD患者在识别负面面部情绪方面存在障碍。实验2重复了这些发现，即参与者必须判断两张脸是否表达相同或不同的情绪。实验3是一项对照研究，参与者必须辨别两张脸是否为同一性别。在这项非情绪处理任务中，两个患者组的表现均比正常参与者差，但FTD患者的表现与阿尔茨海默病患者相当。我们得出结论，FTD患者在识别负面面部情绪方面存在障碍。
