Increased subjective experience of non-target emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Although laboratory procedures are designed to produce specific emotions, participants often experience mixed emotions (i.e., target and non-target emotions). We examined non-target emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), other neurodegenerative diseases, and healthy controls. Participants watched film clips designed to produce three target emotions. Subjective experience of non-target emotions was assessed and emotional facial expressions were coded. Compared to patients with other neurodegenerative diseases and healthy controls, FTD patients reported more positive and negative non-target emotions, whereas AD patients reported more positive non-target emotions. There were no group differences in facial expressions of non-target emotions. We interpret these findings as reflecting deficits in processing interoceptive and contextual information resulting from neurodegeneration in brain regions critical for creating subjective emotional experience.

Greater Experience of Negative Non-Target Emotions by Patients with Neurodegenerative Diseases Is Related to Lower Emotional Well-Being in Caregivers

“…Caregivers of AD ( p =.067) and OND ( p =.061) patients also had lower emotional well-being than partners of HC at trend levels. As reported previously [17], results also revealed significant group effects in self-reported non-target emotions in all three films, F s>4.25, p s<.006. Post hoc comparisons (Bonferroni-corrected) revealed that patients with FTD reported greater experience of negative non-target emotions in all three films and greater experience of positive non-target emotions in the amusement and disgust films, compared to at least one of the other three groups ( p s<.05).…”

“…The present study focused on the part of the assessment in which participants (patients and controls) viewed three films (in a fixed order) that had been previously found to elicit one of three target emotions in neurologically healthy adults [17,26,27]: amusement ( I Love Lucy ), sadness ( The Champ ), and disgust ( Fear Factor ). Participants rested for 60 seconds before watching each film.…”

“…Self-report of emotional experiences may be compromised in patients with neurodegenerative disease due to language dysfunction or difficulty in using rating scales [8,17]. To account for this, we quantified inconsistencies between the valence of a participant’s answers to the open-ended questions and the valence that the participant endorsed in the following question.…”

“…Based on previous research [17], we accounted for a set of covariates 6 that may affect these key study variables, including: patient age, sex, disease status (i.e., patient vs. controls), dementia severity (CDR-Box), and patient emotion rating deficit. Additionally, we included patient report of the target emotion as a covariate to account for individual differences in emotional reactivity [30].…”

“…In a recent study, we found that patients with FTD and AD reported experiencing more atypical or non-target emotions than patients with other neurodegenerative diseases and healthy controls. To illustrate, patients in the study experienced anger in response to a slapstick comedy that primarily produced the target emotion of amusement in most viewers [17]. …”