van Asselen Marieke, Júlio Filipa, Januário Cristina, Campos Elzbieta Bobrowicz, Almeida Inês, Cavaco Sara, Castelo-Branco Miguel
Visual Neuroscience Laboratory, Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Biomedical Research in Light and Image, University of Coimbra Coimbra, Portugal.
Front Psychol. 2012 Feb 16;3:31. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00031. eCollection 2012.
In the current study, we aimed to investigate the emotion recognition impairment in Huntington's disease (HD) patients and define whether this deficit is caused by impaired scanning patterns of the face. To achieve this goal, we recorded eye movements during a two-alternative forced-choice emotion recognition task. HD patients in pre-symptomatic (n = 16) and symptomatic (n = 9) disease stages were tested and their performance was compared to a control group (n = 22). In our emotion recognition task, participants had to indicate whether a face reflected one of six basic emotions. In addition, and in order to define whether emotion recognition was altered when the participants were forced to look at a specific component of the face, we used a second task where only limited facial information was provided (eyes/mouth in partially masked faces). Behavioral results showed no differences in the ability to recognize emotions between pre-symptomatic gene carriers and controls. However, an emotion recognition deficit was found for all six basic emotion categories in early stage HD. Analysis of eye movement patterns showed that patient and controls used similar scanning strategies. Patterns of deficits were similar regardless of whether parts of the faces were masked or not, thereby confirming that selective attention to particular face parts is not underlying the deficits. These results suggest that the emotion recognition deficits in symptomatic HD patients cannot be explained by impaired scanning patterns of faces. Furthermore, no selective deficit for recognition of disgust was found in pre-symptomatic HD patients.
在当前研究中，我们旨在调查亨廷顿舞蹈症（HD）患者的情绪识别障碍，并确定这种缺陷是否由面部扫描模式受损所致。为实现这一目标，我们在二选一强制选择情绪识别任务中记录了眼动情况。对处于症状前阶段（n = 16）和症状阶段（n = 9）的HD患者进行了测试，并将他们的表现与一个对照组（n = 22）进行比较。在我们的情绪识别任务中，参与者必须指出一张脸是否反映了六种基本情绪之一。此外，为了确定当参与者被迫注视面部的特定部分时情绪识别是否会改变，我们使用了第二项任务，其中仅提供有限的面部信息（部分遮挡面部中的眼睛/嘴巴）。行为结果显示，症状前基因携带者和对照组在情绪识别能力上没有差异。然而，在HD早期阶段，发现所有六种基本情绪类别均存在情绪识别缺陷。眼动模式分析表明，患者和对照组使用了相似的扫描策略。无论面部部分是否被遮挡，缺陷模式都是相似的，从而证实对特定面部部分的选择性注意并非缺陷的根本原因。这些结果表明，症状性HD患者的情绪识别缺陷不能用面部扫描模式受损来解释。此外，在症状前HD患者中未发现对厌恶情绪识别的选择性缺陷。
