Emotion Processing for Arousal and Neutral Content in Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Objective. To assess the ability of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients to perceive emotional information and to assign subjective emotional rating scores to audiovisual presentations. Materials and Methods. 24 subjects (14 with AD, matched to controls for age and educational levels) were studied. After neuropsychological assessment, they watched a Neutral story and then a story with Emotional content. Results. Recall scores for both stories were significantly lower in AD (Neutral and Emotional: P = .001). CG assigned different emotional scores for each version of the test, P = .001, while ratings of AD did not differ, P = .32. Linear regression analyses determined the best predictors of emotional rating and recognition memory for each group among neuropsychological tests battery. Conclusions. AD patients show changes in emotional processing on declarative memory and a preserved ability to express emotions in face of arousal content. The present findings suggest that these impairments are due to general cognitive decline.

Emotional memory enhancement in respect of positive visual stimuli in Alzheimer's disease emerges after rich and deep encoding

“…Other studies have described EEM as normal in AD. Better immediate recall (Kazui, Mori, Hashimoto, & Hirono, 2003;Kazui et al, 2000;Satler et al, 2010) and recognition (Moaeri, Cahill, Jin, & Potkin, 2000) performances have been reported for negative stories than for neutral ones. Some authors reported immediate free recall of both negative and positive stories as being better than immediate free recall of neutral stories (Boller et al, 2002).…”

“…However, emotional processing appears to be relatively preserved in AD patients, insofar as their subjective valence and arousal ratings (Boller et al, 2002;Budson et al, 2004;Kensinger, Anderson, Growdon, & Corkin, 2004;Kensinger, Brierley, Medford, Growdon, & Corkin, 2002;Satler, Uribe, Conde, Da Silva, & Tomaz, 2010), electro-dermal responses (Hamann et al, 2000), attention distribution patterns in respect of emotional stimuli (LaBar, Mesulam, Gitelman, & Weintraub, 2000), intentional use of suppression of expressed emotion (Henry, Rendell, Scicluna, Jackson, & Phillips, 2009), and differential reactivity to failure-versus-success tasks, in terms of both self-reports and facial expressions (Mograbi, Brown, c o r t e x 6 5 ( 2 0 1 5 ) 8 9 e1 0 1 Salas, & Morris, 2012), are similar to those of control participants. Nonetheless, AD patients seem impaired in their ability to control the negative expression of emotion even if the selfratings of the emotional experiences were similar to those of control participants (Smith, 1995).…”

The Effectiveness of Facial Expression Recognition in Detecting Emotional Responses to Sound Interventions in Older Adults With Dementia

“…Emotions can be perceived and evaluated as their status changes with change in the person–environment relationship (Rolls, 2019 ). Despite their cognitive impairment, older adults with dementia continue to display emotions, and their internal emotional processing may be intact or partially retained (Satler et al, 2010 ); specifically, they retain the feeling and acquisition of emotions (Blessing et al, 2006 ). In addition, the emotions reflected by facial expressions are similar between older adults with mild dementia and typical older adults (Smith, 1995 ).…”

The Impact of Aging and Alzheimer's Disease on Emotional Enhancement of Memory

“…There are also conflicting results about the presence of EEM in AD, which mostly affects elderly people. Several studies did not find EEM in AD [5,20,21,22,23]. Others demonstrated different EEM patterns for word recall [24] and for picture recall [25] in AD.…”