Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences (MICCN).
Cognition and Emotion Research Centre, School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University.
Neuropsychology. 2018 Mar;32(3):356-365. doi: 10.1037/neu0000424.
Previous research has consistently shown that the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions is impaired in Huntington's disease (HD). The aim of this study was to examine whether people with the gene expansion for HD visually scan the most emotionally informative features of human faces less than unaffected individuals, and whether altered visual scanning predicts emotion recognition in HD beyond general disease-related decline.
We recorded eye movements of 25 participants either in the late premanifest or early stage of HD and 25 age-matched healthy control participants during a face-viewing task. The task involved the viewing of pictures depicting human faces with angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and neutral expressions, and evaluating each face on a valence rating scale. For data analysis, we defined 2 regions of interest (ROIs) on each picture, including an eye-ROI and a nose/mouth-ROI. Emotion recognition abilities were measured using an established emotion-recognition task and general disease-related decline was measured using the UHDRS motor score.
Compared to the control participants, the HD participants spent less time looking at the ROIs relative to the total time spent looking at the pictures (partial η2 = 0.10), and made fewer fixations on the ROIs (partial η2 = 0.16). Furthermore, visual scanning of the eye-ROI, but not the nose/mouth-ROI, predicted emotion recognition performance in the HD group, over and beyond general disease-related decline.
The emotion recognition deficit in HD may partly be explained by general disease-related decline in cognition and motor functioning and partly by a social-emotional deficit, which is reflected in reduced eye-viewing. (PsycINFO Database Record
先前的研究一致表明，亨廷顿病（HD）患者识别面部表情情绪的能力受损。本研究旨在检验 HD 基因扩展的个体是否比未受影响的个体较少地对人脸的最具情感信息量的特征进行视觉扫描，以及视觉扫描的改变是否可以预测 HD 患者的情绪识别能力，而不仅仅是与一般疾病相关的下降。
我们记录了 25 名处于 HD 晚前期或早期的患者和 25 名年龄匹配的健康对照者在观看人脸图片任务中的眼动。任务包括观看描绘生气、厌恶、恐惧、高兴和中性表情的人脸图片，并在效价评分量表上对每张脸进行评估。为了进行数据分析，我们在每张图片上定义了 2 个感兴趣区域（ROI），包括一个眼部 ROI 和一个鼻子/嘴部 ROI。使用已建立的情绪识别任务来测量情绪识别能力，使用 UHDRS 运动评分来测量与一般疾病相关的下降。
与对照组相比，HD 组患者在观看 ROI 上花费的时间相对较少（偏η2 = 0.10），在 ROI 上的注视次数也较少（偏η2 = 0.16）。此外，眼部 ROI 的视觉扫描，而不是鼻子/嘴部 ROI 的视觉扫描，预测了 HD 组的情绪识别表现，这超出了与一般疾病相关的下降。
HD 中的情绪识别缺陷可能部分可以用认知和运动功能的一般疾病相关下降来解释，部分可以用社会情感缺陷来解释，这反映在减少的眼部注视上。
