Cousins Rosanna, Pettigrew Anne, Ferrie Olivia, Hanley J Richard
Department of Psychology, Liverpool Hope University, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
J Neuropsychol. 2021 Apr;15 Suppl 1:8-26. doi: 10.1111/jnp.12210. Epub 2020 Apr 23.
This investigation examined whether impairment in configural processing could explain deficits in face emotion recognition in people with Parkinson's disease (PD). Stimuli from the Radboud Faces Database were used to compare recognition of four negative emotion expressions by older adults with PD (n = 16) and matched controls (n = 17). Participants were tasked with categorizing emotional expressions from upright and inverted whole faces and facial composites; it is difficult to derive configural information from these two types of stimuli so featural processing should play a larger than usual role in accurate recognition of emotional expressions. We found that the PD group were impaired relative to controls in recognizing anger, disgust and fearful expressions in upright faces. Then, consistent with a configural processing deficit, participants with PD showed no composite effect when attempting to identify facial expressions of anger, disgust and fear. A face inversion effect, however, was observed in the performance of all participants in both the whole faces and facial composites tasks. These findings can be explained in terms of a configural processing deficit if it is assumed that the disruption caused by facial composites was specific to configural processing, whereas inversion reduced performance by making it difficult to derive both featural and configural information from faces.
本研究调查了构型加工障碍是否能够解释帕金森病（PD）患者面部情绪识别缺陷。研究使用了拉德堡德面部数据库中的刺激物，比较了16名患有PD的老年人和17名匹配的对照组对四种负面情绪表情的识别情况。参与者的任务是对正立和倒置的完整面部以及面部合成图像中的情绪表情进行分类；从这两种类型的刺激物中很难提取构型信息，因此在准确识别情绪表情时，特征加工应发挥比平常更大的作用。我们发现，在识别正立面部的愤怒、厌恶和恐惧表情方面，PD组相对于对照组存在障碍。然后，与构型加工缺陷一致，患有PD的参与者在试图识别愤怒、厌恶和恐惧的面部表情时未表现出合成效应。然而，在整个面部和面部合成图像任务中，所有参与者的表现都出现了面部倒置效应。如果假设面部合成图像造成的干扰特定于构型加工，而倒置则通过使从面部提取特征和构型信息变得困难而降低了表现，那么这些发现可以用构型加工缺陷来解释。
