Department of Psychology, College of Science, National Taiwan University, Taiwan.
Department of Neurology, National Taiwan University Hospital, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
J Alzheimers Dis. 2021;80(1):259-269. doi: 10.3233/JAD-200916.
The issue of whether there exists an own-effect on facial recognition in the elderly remains equivocal. Moreover, currently the literature of this issue in pathological aging is little.
Our study was thus to explore the issue in both of healthy older people and patients with ADMethods:In study 1, 27 older and 31 younger healthy adults were recruited; in study 2, 27 healthy older adults and 80 patients (including subjective cognitive decline (SCD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD) groups) were recruited. Participants received the Taiwan Facial Emotion Recognition Task (FER Task), and a clinical neuropsychological assessment.
No significant differences on the FER test were found among our groups, except for sadness recognition in which our MCI and AD patients' scores were remarkably lower than their healthy counterparts. The own-age effect was not significantly evident in healthy younger and older adults, except for recognizing neutral photos. Our patients with MCI and AD tended to have the effect, particularly for the sad recognition in which the effect was significantly evident in terms of error features (mislabeling it as anger in younger-face and neutral in older-face photos).
Our results displayed no remarkable own-age effect on facial emotional recognition in the healthy elderly (including SCD). However, it did not appear the case for MCI and AD patients, especially their recognizing those sadness items, suggesting that an inclusion of the FER task particularly involving those items of low-intensity emotion in clinical neuropsychological assessment might be contributory to the early detection of AD-related pathological individuals.
老年人面部识别是否存在自身效应仍存在争议。此外，目前关于病理性衰老这一问题的文献很少。
本研究旨在探讨健康老年人和 AD 患者的这一问题。
在研究 1 中，招募了 27 名老年健康人和 31 名年轻健康人；在研究 2 中，招募了 27 名健康老年人和 80 名患者（包括主观认知下降（SCD）、轻度认知障碍（MCI）和阿尔茨海默病（AD）组）。参与者接受了台湾面部情绪识别任务（FER 任务）和临床神经心理学评估。
我们的组间 FER 测试无显著差异，除了 MCI 和 AD 患者对悲伤的识别分数明显低于其健康对照组。健康的年轻和老年人中没有明显的自身年龄效应，除了识别中性照片。我们的 MCI 和 AD 患者有这种倾向，尤其是在悲伤的识别中，在错误特征方面，这种效应明显（将年轻面孔的照片错误标记为愤怒，而将年长面孔的照片错误标记为中性）。
我们的结果显示，健康老年人（包括 SCD）对面部情绪识别没有明显的自身年龄效应。然而，对于 MCI 和 AD 患者来说并非如此，尤其是他们对悲伤项目的识别，这表明在临床神经心理学评估中纳入 FER 任务，特别是涉及低强度情绪的项目，可能有助于 AD 相关病理个体的早期发现。
