Persons with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) are impaired in recognizing emotions from face and voice. Yet clinical practitioners use these mediums to communicate with DAT patients. Music is also used in clinical practice, but little is known about emotional processing from music in DAT. This study aims to assess emotional recognition in mild DAT. Seven patients with DAT and 16 healthy elderly adults were given three tasks of emotional recognition for face, prosody, and music. DAT participants were only impaired in the emotional recognition from the face. These preliminary results suggest that dynamic auditory emotions are preserved in DAT.

This preliminary study may contribute to improving comprehension of emotional recognition following TBI. Future studies of larger samples could usefully include measures of functional impacts of recognition deficits for fearful facial expressions. These could help refine interventions for emotional recognition following a brain injury.

The present study aimed to measure neural information processing underlying emotional recognition from facial expressions in adults having sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) as compared to healthy individuals. We thus measured early (N1, N170) and later (N2) event-related potential (ERP) components during presentation of fearful, neutral, and happy facial expressions in 10 adults with mTBI and 11 control participants. Findings indicated significant differences between groups, irrespective of emotional expression, in the early attentional stage (N1), which was altered in mTBI. The two groups showed similar perceptual integration of facial features (N170), with greater amplitude for fearful facial expressions in the right hemisphere. At a higher-level emotional discrimination stage (N2), both groups demonstrated preferential processing for fear as compared to happiness and neutrality. These findings suggest a reduced early selective attentional processing following mTBI, but no impact on the perceptual and higher-level cognitive processes stages. This study contributes to further improving our comprehension of attentional versus emotional recognition following a mild TBI.