Grabyan Jonathan M, Morgan Erin E, Cameron Marizela V, Villalobos Javier, Grant Igor, Paul Woods Steven
Department of Psychology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Arch Clin Neuropsychol. 2018 Mar 1;33(2):184-193. doi: 10.1093/arclin/acx058.
Emotion processing has received little research focus in HIV, but emerging evidence suggests that abilities such as facial affect discrimination may be features of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND). The present study hypothesized that individuals with HAND would evidence an emotion processing deficit relative to cognitively unimpaired individuals with HIV and seronegative comparison participants on a task assessing these abilities. Moreover, it was expected that this deficit would be significantly associated with social aspects of everyday functioning.
To explore these hypotheses, 37 HIV+ individuals with HAND, 46 HIV+ without HAND, and 38 HIV-seronegative comparison participants were administered the CogState Social Emotional Cognition Task (SECT) and the UCSD Performance-based Skills Assessment-Brief (UPSA-B).
Results revealed that the HAND group was more likely to have impaired accuracy and slower reaction time relative to the comparison groups on the SECT task. In fact, individuals with HAND were almost 10 times more likely to be impaired on emotion processing accuracy than HIV+ without HAND. Among individuals with HIV, accuracy (but not reaction time) was independently related to a functional capacity measure tapping social ability, but not to a similar measure without a social component (UPSA-B Communication and Finances subscales, respectively).
These results suggest that disruption of emotion processing may be an important feature of HAND that has clinical value as an independent predictor of real-world activities that involve social components. Future research should prospectively investigate this relationship, which may inform of intervention strategies for improving everyday functioning.
情绪加工在艾滋病病毒（HIV）研究中很少受到关注，但新出现的证据表明，诸如面部表情识别等能力可能是HIV相关神经认知障碍（HAND）的特征。本研究假设，在一项评估这些能力的任务中，与认知未受损的HIV感染者及血清学阴性的对照参与者相比，HAND患者会表现出情绪加工缺陷。此外，预计这一缺陷将与日常功能的社会方面显著相关。
为了探究这些假设，对37名患有HAND的HIV阳性个体、46名未患HAND的HIV阳性个体以及38名HIV血清学阴性的对照参与者进行了CogState社会情绪认知任务（SECT）和加州大学圣地亚哥分校基于表现的技能评估简表（UPSA-B）测试。
结果显示，在SECT任务中，与对照组相比，HAND组更有可能出现准确性受损和反应时间延长的情况。事实上，患有HAND的个体在情绪加工准确性方面受损的可能性几乎是未患HAND的HIV阳性个体的10倍。在HIV感染者中，准确性（而非反应时间）与一项衡量社交能力的功能能力指标独立相关，但与一项没有社会成分的类似指标（分别为UPSA-B沟通和财务分量表）无关。
这些结果表明，情绪加工障碍可能是HAND的一个重要特征，作为涉及社会成分的现实世界活动的独立预测指标具有临床价值。未来的研究应前瞻性地调查这种关系，这可能为改善日常功能的干预策略提供信息。
