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Facial expressions convey important information on emotional states of our interaction partners. However, in interactions between younger and older adults, there is evidence for a reduced ability to accurately decode emotional facial expressions. Previous studies have often followed up this phenomenon by examining the effect of the observers' age. However, decoding emotional faces is also likely to be influenced by stimulus features, and age-related changes in the face such as wrinkles and folds may render facial expressions of older adults harder to decode. In this paper, we review theoretical frameworks and empirical findings on age effects on decoding emotional expressions, with an emphasis on age-of-face effects. We conclude that the age of the face plays an important role for facial expression decoding. Lower expressivity, age-related changes in the face, less elaborated emotion schemas for older faces, negative attitudes toward older adults, and different visual scan patterns and neural processing of older than younger faces may lower decoding accuracy for older faces. Furthermore, age-related stereotypes and age-related changes in the face may bias the attribution of specific emotions such as sadness to older faces.

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Parkinson's disease (PD) has been associated with a general impairment of procedures and with an impairment of syntactic procedures in particular. The present study investigated comprehension processes in PD using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). PD patients and controls listened to sentences that were either correct or syntactically or semantically incorrect. The language-related ERP component correlated with semantic processes (N400) was present in both groups. In the syntactic domain, early automatic processes (early negativity) appeared normal in PD, whereas late integrational processes (P600) were modulated by this disease. The present findings suggest that the basal ganglia primarily do not support early automatic syntactic processes during comprehension but rather support processes of syntactic integration.

Cognitive rehabilitation (CR) is a promising treatment approach for older adults with dementia because it aims at supporting the management of day-to-day problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding whether CR provides clinically meaningful benefits. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility, acceptance, efficacy, and usefulness of a CR intervention in a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial on 201 patients with mild dementia in Alzheimer disease and their carers. The intervention comprised 12 individual weekly sessions and combined 4 established strategies adopted from neurorehabilitation and psychotherapy. Activities of daily living were chosen as the primary outcome. The results show that the feasibility, treatment adherence, and carer commitment were excellent. However, no effect of the intervention was demonstrable on everyday functioning. There were improvements favoring the intervention on quality of life and treatment satisfaction and a significant antidepressant effect in female participants. The lack of impact on everyday activities may be due to methodological limitations including insufficient personalization, short treatment duration, poor transfer into the real-life setting, and low sensitivity of assessment instruments. The findings of this study may be helpful for designing further studies that are needed to determine the potential of CR in older adults with dementia.

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