title: An exploratory study on facial emotion recognition capacity in beginning Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  It was the aim of this study to investigate facial emotion recognition (FER) in the elderly with cognitive impairment.
  
  
  METHODS
  Twelve patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 12 healthy control subjects were asked to name dynamic or static pictures of basic facial emotions using the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test and to assess the degree of their difficulty in the recognition task, while their electrodermal conductance was registered as an unconscious processing measure.
  
  
  RESULTS
  AD patients had lower objective recognition performances for disgust and fear, but only disgust was accompanied by decreased subjective FER in AD patients. The electrodermal response was similar in all groups. No significant effect of dynamic versus static emotion presentation on FER was found.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Selective impairment in recognizing facial expressions of disgust and fear may indicate a nonlinear decline in FER capacity with increasing cognitive impairment and result from progressive though specific damage to neural structures engaged in emotional processing and facial emotion identification. Although our results suggest unchanged unconscious FER processing with increasing cognitive impairment, further investigations on unconscious FER and self-awareness of FER capacity in neurodegenerative disorders are required.
authors.affiliation: Consultation de la Mémoire, Département de Psychiatrie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland. Marzanna.Wiechetek-Ostos@chuv.ch
authors.forename: Marzanna
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wiechetek Ostos
authors.forename: Françoise
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schenk
authors.forename: Tania
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Baenziger
authors.forename: Armin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: von Gunten
mesh_terms: D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology*; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods