Error profiles of facial emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

OBJECTIVES

To identify the patterns of errors in facial emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) subtypes compared with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls.

DESIGN

Retrospective analysis.

SETTING

Participants were recruited from FRONTIER, the frontotemporal dementia research group at the University of Sydney, Australia.

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 356 participants (behavioral-variant FTD (bvFTD): 62, semantic dementia (SD)-left: 29, SD-right: 14, progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA): 21, AD: 76, controls: 90) were included.

MEASUREMENTS

Facial emotion recognition was assessed using the Facial Affect Selection Task, a word-face matching task measuring recognition of the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise), as well as neutral emotion, portrayed by black and white faces.

RESULTS

Overall, all clinical groups performed significantly worse than controls with the exception of the PNFA subgroup ( = .051). The SD-right group scored worse than all other clinical groups (all values < .027) and the bvFTD subgroup performed worse than the PNFA group ( < .001). The most frequent errors were in response to the facial emotions (26.1%) and (22.9%). The primary error response to each target emotion was identified; patterns of errors were similar across all clinical groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Facial emotion recognition is impaired in FTD and AD compared to healthy controls. Within FTD, bvFTD and SD-right are particularly impaired. Dementia groups cannot be distinguished based on error responses alone. Implications for future clinical diagnosis and research are discussed.