Chia-Yao Lin1, Li-Chuan Hsu12, Chon-Haw Tsai23, Yi-Min Tien4 1Graduate Institute of Neural and Cognitive Sciences, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan;
2School of Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan;
3Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Neurology, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan; 4Department of Psychology, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
Discrimination of facial expressions in patients
with Parkinson's disease
zPervious studies suggested that patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) could not recognized negative facial stimuli correctly, but some criticized on this point.
zThe possible confounded variables could be the
presentation time of target faces and the motor severity of PD.
zIn the present study, we adopted fast emotional
discrimination task (FEDT) to investigate the performance of PD in discriminating emotional facial expressions.
zThe face discrimination in FEDT was more similar to that in the real world.
Experiment 1 (PD v.s. Healthy Control, HC)
zParticipant:
zPDs discriminated happy, sad and angry faces longer than healthy controls did,
zPDs also had less accuracy in the condition of happy and sad faces compared with healthy controls.
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Fast Emotional Discrimination Task (FEDT)
Fixation frame 500ms 300ms + Time Positive (happiness) Negative
(sadness, fear, angry) Ekman’s face (Ekman & Frisen, 1979)
zWe also investigate whether PD’s performance in FEDT related to the levels of their motor severity.
28.29 2.93 57.39 HC (n=28) 27.61 11.61 61.68 PD (n=28) MMSE BDI-II AGE
Experiment 2 (PD with different motor severities v.s. HC)
zParticipant:
zIn the condition of sad face, PDs with lower motor severity had less accuracy than HC did.
zCompared with HC, PDs with higher motor severity responded slower to happy, sad and angry faces, and they also had less accuracy to happy and anger faces.
49.71 27.07 15.29 62.86 PDs with higher motor score (n=14) 25.07 28.14 7.93 60.50 PDs with lower motor score (n=14) . 28.29 2.93 57.39 HC (n=28) UPSRD III MMSE BDI-II AGE 500 550 600 650 700 750 800 850 900 950
happiness sadness fear anger
Re s p o n se t im e ( ms ) HC LPD HPD 75 80 85 90 95 100
happiness sadness fear anger
A ccu ra c y ra te ( % ) HC LPD HPD 500 550 600 650 700 750 800 850 900
happiness sadness fear anger
R e s pon s e ti m e ( m s ) HC PD 75 80 85 90 95 100
happiness sadness fear anger
A c c u ra c y ra te ( % ) HC PD ms ms ms
Discussion and Conclusion
z To our knowledge, the present study is the first one that found PDs had selective deficits in discriminating positive faces.
z The motor severity in PD had impact on discriminating facial expressions, and this ability would be getting worse with the progress of motor severity. Acknowledgment: Supported by National Science Council of Taiwan, 100-2410-H-039-001-MY2 ; E-mail: [email protected]
