Facial Expression Processing Is Not Affected by Parkinson’s Disease, but by Age-Related Factors

Abstract

The question whether facial expression processing may be impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients so far has yielded equivocal results – existing studies, however, have focused on testing expression processing in recognition tasks with static images of six standard, emotional facial expressions. Given that non-verbal communication contains both emotional and non-emotional, conversational expressions and that input to the brain is usually dynamic, here we address the question of potential facial expression processing differences in a novel format: we test a range of conversational and emotional, dynamic facial expressions in three groups – PD patients (n = 20), age- and education-matched older healthy controls (n = 20), and younger adult healthy controls (n = 20). This setup allows us to address both effects of PD and age-related differences. We employed a rating task for all groups in which 12 rating dimensions were used to assess evaluative processing of 27 expression videos from six different actors. We found that ratings overall were consistent across groups with several rating dimensions (such as arousal or outgoingness) having a strong correlation with the expressions’ motion energy content as measured by optic flow analysis. Most importantly, we found that the PD group did not differ in any rating dimension from the older healthy control group (HCG), indicating highly similar evaluation processing. Both older groups, however, did show significant differences for several rating scales in comparison with the younger adults HCG. Looking more closely, older participants rated negative expressions compared to the younger participants as more positive, but also as less natural, persuasive, empathic, and sincere. We interpret these findings in the context of the positivity effect and in-group processing advantages. Overall, our findings do not support strong processing deficits due to PD, but rather point to age-related differences in facial expression processing.

The ability of patients with Parkinson’s disease to recognize masked faces during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The rates of individuals with difficulty recognizing people they saw every day and asking an unrecognized person to remove their mask to recognize them were higher in the PwP group than in the YHC group, but there was no statistically significant difference between the OHC and YHC groups. These findings are consistent with the results of another study that compared PwP, OHC, and YHC groups in terms of recognizing facial expressions on a video 22 . However, in contrast to that study evaluating tasks using holistic processing, we assessed a challenging aspect of daily life that emphasizes feature-based processing, which is reportedly intact in individuals over the age of 50 years.…”

“…Derya et al reported that the PwP performed similar to their peers in detecting facial expression shown on a video whereas they were at a disadvantage when asked to recognize facial expressions from photographs in a laboratory task 22 . When this finding is evaluated together with the results of previous studies reporting a disconnection of the pathways extending from the prefrontal region to the ventral and dorsal pathways of visual processing in PwP 23 , the PwP performing similar to their peers in recognizing facial expressions in a more dynamic circumstance of a video may indicate that the dorsal pathway associated with dynamic processes is less affected in PD.…”