Ciccarelli Nicoletta, Anzuino Isabella, Pepe Fulvio, Magni Eugenio, Traficante Daniela, Silveri Maria Caterina
Department of Psychology.
Department of Neuroscience.
Neuropsychology. 2022 May;36(4):279-287. doi: 10.1037/neu0000802. Epub 2022 Mar 14.
We explored the relationship between a visual scanning strategy and a facial emotion recognition deficit in Parkinson's disease (PD).
Thirty nondemented PD patients (balanced for symptom side at onset) and 20 age, education and gender-matched healthy controls (HC) were enrolled. The PD group underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological battery also exploring the executive functions. In both groups, eye movements were recorded while subjects categorized facial emotion from Ekman's 60-faces test. We were particularly interested in the location of fixations on facial pictures (top vs. bottom) and in emotional valence (positive vs. negative). We also compared performance of the two groups on a verbal emotion attribution task.
Compared to HC, PD patients performed worse on visual recognition of negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness (where the upper part of the face is more informative than the lower part); the two groups did not differ on the verbal emotion attribution task. HC modified their visual scanning strategy (both number and overall time duration of fixations) according to the valence of the emotion; by contrast, PD showed the same pattern regardless of the valence. In the PD group, accuracy in the visual recognition of negative emotions and fixation pattern correlated with performance on tasks exploring executive functions; however, no associations were observed with severity of motor state.
Our results suggest that visual scanning strategy contributes significantly to the facial emotion recognition deficit of PD patients, especially at a "high level" related to cognitive control of eye movements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
我们探究了视觉扫描策略与帕金森病（PD）患者面部情绪识别缺陷之间的关系。
招募了30名无痴呆的PD患者（发病时症状侧均衡）以及20名年龄、教育程度和性别匹配的健康对照者（HC）。PD组接受了一套全面的神经心理学测试，其中也包括对执行功能的评估。在两组中，当受试者对埃克曼60张面部表情测试中的面部情绪进行分类时，记录其眼动情况。我们特别关注面部图片上注视点的位置（上部与下部）以及情绪效价（积极与消极）。我们还比较了两组在言语情绪归因任务上的表现。
与HC相比，PD患者在对愤怒、恐惧和悲伤等负面情绪的视觉识别上表现更差（在这些情绪中，面部上部比下部提供的信息更多）；两组在言语情绪归因任务上没有差异。HC会根据情绪效价改变其视觉扫描策略（注视点的数量和总持续时间）；相比之下，PD患者无论情绪效价如何都表现出相同的模式。在PD组中，负面情绪视觉识别的准确性和注视模式与执行功能探索任务的表现相关；然而，未观察到与运动状态严重程度的关联。
我们的结果表明，视觉扫描策略对PD患者的面部情绪识别缺陷有显著影响，尤其是在与眼动认知控制相关的“高级”层面。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2022美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
