Review of Emotion Recognition in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

Background: While dysfunction in emotion recognition is sometimes apparent with aging, and is frequently evident in Alzheimer’s disease, it is unclear whether individuals who have a high risk of developing dementia exhibit demonstrable changes. Method: A review of the literature pertaining to mild cognitive impairment was undertaken to discern the extent to which emotion recognition deficits are evident in this prodromal period. Results: A search of Medline, Psycinfo and Psyextra databases using specific key words identified only six relevant studies. These studies suggest that the ability to accurately identify facial expressions of affect is compromised. Conclusions: Research in this area is in its infancy. Suggestions are made for furthering our knowledge about this important ability which affects interpersonal relationships, daily functioning, mental well-being and quality of life.

Review of Emotion Recognition in Stroke Patients

“…Without using a suitable emotional task, it is difficult to ascertain whether participants' poor performance with tasks of emotion recognition is due to an inability to identify emotions or whether their difficulties arise from decision making, categorization skills or the inability to identify the most salient features defining category boundaries. Indeed, the extent of emotion recognition in stroke patients appears to be correlated with a variety of interpersonal difficulties, such as complaints of frustration in social relations, feelings of social discomfort, desires to connect with others, feelings of social disconnection and use of controlling behaviors [94,95]. Future research should aim to explore the need for large, longitudinal studies of emotion recognition in brain damage patients that are informed by emerging ‘neurobiological data' together with a ‘suitable methodological' approach, and which use consistent measures of disease stage and overall severity as well as uniform assessment instruments.…”

Behavioral and neural correlates of visual emotion discrimination and empathy in mild cognitive impairment

“…The ability to explicitly rate emotions from visual material is impaired in AD patients [10][11][12][13], while in MCI subjects results are controversial (for a review see [14]). Similarly, visual EEF was not found in AD patients [26,70,71], either in intentional or incidental encoding [72], while mixed findings are reported in MCI subjects.…”

“…Indeed, in Alzheimer's disease (AD), deficits in the visual recognition of faces expressing anger [10,11], surprise [12], disgust [10], sadness, fear and happiness [11,13], have been shown. In contrast, MCI results are to date far from being conclusive [14], indicating that emotion recognition deficits may be absent [10,15], general [13,16,17], specific to negative expressions [11,18,19], or present only in multiple-domain MCI [13,17,20].…”

Mini-Cog and Mini-Mental State Examination: Agreement in a Cross-Sectional Study with an Elderly Sample

“…Nonverbal information is more affected than verbal, and recall is more affected than recognition of information [3]. With aging, these abilities tend to diminish in a dimensional spectrum, affecting individuals differently, from very mild cognitive impairment to severe dementia [2,4]. …”