Berkeley Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94115, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2020 Jul 1;15(5):511-522. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa060.
Deficits in emotion perception (the ability to infer others' emotions accurately) can occur as a result of neurodegeneration. It remains unclear how different neurodegenerative diseases affect different forms of emotion perception. The present study compares performance on a dynamic tracking task of emotion perception (where participants track the changing valence of a film character's emotions) with performance on an emotion category labeling task (where participants label specific emotions portrayed by film characters) across seven diagnostic groups (N = 178) including Alzheimer's disease (AD), behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), corticobasal syndrome and healthy controls. Consistent with hypotheses, compared to controls, the bvFTD group was impaired on both tasks. The svPPA group was impaired on the emotion labeling task, whereas the nfvPPA, PSP and AD groups were impaired on the dynamic tracking task. Smaller volumes in bilateral frontal and left insular regions were associated with worse labeling, whereas smaller volumes in bilateral medial frontal, temporal and right insular regions were associated with worse tracking. Findings suggest labeling and tracking facets of emotion perception are differentially affected across neurodegenerative diseases due to their unique neuroanatomical correlates.
情绪感知缺陷（即准确推断他人情绪的能力）可能是神经退行性变的结果。不同的神经退行性疾病如何影响不同形式的情绪感知尚不清楚。本研究比较了七个诊断组（N=178）在情绪感知的动态跟踪任务（参与者跟踪电影角色情绪变化的效价）和情绪类别标记任务（参与者标记电影角色所描绘的特定情绪）中的表现，包括阿尔茨海默病（AD）、行为变异额颞叶痴呆（bvFTD）、语义变异原发性进行性失语症（svPPA）、非流利型原发性进行性失语症（nfvPPA）、进行性核上性麻痹（PSP）、皮质基底节综合征和健康对照组。与假设一致，与对照组相比，bvFTD 组在两项任务中均受损。svPPA 组在情绪标记任务中受损，而 nfvPPA、PSP 和 AD 组在动态跟踪任务中受损。双侧额叶和左侧脑岛区域的体积较小与标记能力较差相关，而双侧额内侧、颞叶和右侧脑岛区域的体积较小与跟踪能力较差相关。研究结果表明，由于其独特的神经解剖学相关性，情绪感知的标记和跟踪方面在神经退行性疾病中受到不同程度的影响。
