Emotional and nonemotional facial expressions in people with Parkinson's disease.
We investigated facial expressivity in 19 people with Parkinson's disease (PD; 14 men and 5 women) and 26 healthy controls (13 men and 13 women). Participants engaged in experimental situations that were designed to evoke emotional facial expressions, including watching video clips and holding conversations, and were asked to pose emotions and imitate nonemotional facial movements. Expressivity was measured with subjective rating scales, objective facial measurements (Facial Action Coding System), and self-report questionnaires. As expected, PD participants showed reduced spontaneous facial expressivity across experimental situations. PD participants also had more difficulty than controls posing emotional expressions and imitating nonemotional facial movements. Despite these difficulties, however, PD participants' overall level of expressivity was still tied to emotional experience and social context.
Centre for the Study of Emotion, Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth PO1 2DY, UK. gwenda.simons@port.ac.uk
Gwenda
G
Simons
Marcia C Smith
MC
Pasqualini
Vasudevi
V
Reddy
Julia
J
Wood
D000368:Aged; D015986:Confounding Factors, Epidemiologic; D003710:Demography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010552:Personality Assessment; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012647:Self-Assessment; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014741:Video Recording