Sola Carlotta, Zanelli Vanessa, Molinari Maria Angela, Casadio Claudia, Ricci Francesco, Carpentiero Omar, Tondelli Manuela, Lui Fausta, Nichelli Paolo Frigio, Benuzzi Francesca
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Unit, AUSL-IRCCS di Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Department of Biomedical, Metabolic and Neural Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2025 Feb 7;16:1535722. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1535722. eCollection 2025.
Recent developments in the field of social cognition have led to a renewed interest in basic and social emotion recognition in early stages of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and FrontoTemporal Dementia (FTD). Despite the growing attention to this issue, only few studies have attempted to investigate emotion recognition using both visual and vocal stimuli. In addition, recent studies have presented conflicting findings regarding the extent of impairment in patients in the early stages of these diseases. The present study aims to investigate emotion understanding (both basic and social emotions), using different tasks with visual and auditory stimuli, to identify supramodal deficits in AD and FTD to provide a reliable tool to better outline their behavioral and emotional profile and useful instruments for their management.
Eighteen patients with AD and 15 patients with FTD were included in the study. Healthy control (HCs) subjects were recruited to obtain normative data for basic emotion recognition tests and social emotion recognition tasks. To evaluate basic emotion recognition, the Facial Emotion Recognition Battery (FERB) and the Emotional Prosody Recognition Battery (EPRB) were administered. To evaluate social emotion recognition, the Faux Pas (FP), Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME), and Reading the Mind in the Voice (RMV) tests were employed.
FTD patients performed significantly worse than HCs in most of the subtests of the basic emotion recognition batteries, where, instead, AD patients were significantly impaired only when required to match emotional facial expression in different individuals (subtask of the FERB). Moreover, FTD patients scored significantly lower in RME and RMV tests compared both to AD patients and to HCs. In addition, ADs were selectively impaired in RMV as respect to HCs.
FTD patients showed deficits in emotion recognition, affecting both basic and social emotions, whether conveyed through facial expressions or prosody. This result may explain the well-known social behavioral difficulties observed in FTD patients from the early stages of the disease. The fewer and specific deficits in AD patients with comparable MMSE scores may be attributed to the mild degree of impairment, as these deficits may appear later in the progression of AD.
社会认知领域的最新进展引发了人们对阿尔茨海默病（AD）和额颞叶痴呆（FTD）早期阶段基本情绪和社会情绪识别的新兴趣。尽管对这一问题的关注日益增加，但只有少数研究尝试使用视觉和声音刺激来调查情绪识别。此外，最近的研究在这些疾病早期患者的损伤程度方面得出了相互矛盾的结果。本研究旨在使用不同的视觉和听觉刺激任务来调查情绪理解（包括基本情绪和社会情绪），以识别AD和FTD中的跨模态缺陷，从而提供一个可靠的工具来更好地勾勒他们的行为和情绪特征，并为他们的管理提供有用的手段。
本研究纳入了18名AD患者和15名FTD患者。招募健康对照（HCs）受试者以获取基本情绪识别测试和社会情绪识别任务的规范数据。为了评估基本情绪识别，使用了面部情绪识别量表（FERB）和情感韵律识别量表（EPRB）。为了评估社会情绪识别，采用了失礼（FP）、眼神读心（RME）和语音读心（RMV）测试。
在基本情绪识别量表的大多数子测试中，FTD患者的表现明显比HCs差，而AD患者仅在需要匹配不同个体的情绪面部表情时（FERB的子任务）有明显损伤。此外，FTD患者在RME和RMV测试中的得分显著低于AD患者和HCs。此外,与HCs相比，AD患者在RMV中存在选择性损伤。
FTD患者在情绪识别方面存在缺陷，无论是通过面部表情还是韵律传达的基本情绪和社会情绪都会受到影响。这一结果可能解释了在疾病早期FTD患者中观察到的众所周知的社会行为困难。具有可比MMSE评分的AD患者中较少且特定的缺陷可能归因于损伤程度较轻，因为这些缺陷可能在AD进展后期出现。
