Emotional processing in healthy ageing, mild cognitive impairment, and alzheimer’s disease

Emotional processing, particularly facial expression recognition, is essential for social cognition, and dysfunction may be associated with poor cognitive health. In pathological ageing con-ditions, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which cognitive impairments...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Cárdenas, José, Blanca, María J., Carvajal Molina, Fernando, Rubio Fernández, Sandra María, Pedraza, Carmen
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/698242
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/698242
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18052770
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Alzheimer’s disease
Diagnosis
Emotional processing assessment
Mild cognitive impairment
Psicología
Descripción
Sumario:Emotional processing, particularly facial expression recognition, is essential for social cognition, and dysfunction may be associated with poor cognitive health. In pathological ageing con-ditions, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which cognitive impairments are present, disturbed emotional processing and difficulty with social interactions have been documented. However, it is unclear how pathological ageing affects emotional processing and human social behaviour. The aim of this study is to provide insight into how emotional processing is affected in MCI and AD and whether this capacity can constitute a differentiating factor allowing the preclinical diagnosis of both diseases. For this purpose, an ecological emotional battery adapted from five subsets of the Florida Affect Battery was used. Given that emotion may not be separated from cognition, the affect battery was divided into subtests according to cognitive demand, resulting in three blocks. Our results showed that individuals with MCI or AD had poorer performance on the emotional processing tasks, although with different patterns, than that of controls. Cognitive demand may be responsible for the execution patterns of different emotional processing tests. Tasks with moderate cognitive demand are the most sensitive for discriminating between two cognitive impairment entities. In summary, emotional processing tasks may aid in characterising the neurocog-nitive deficits in MCI or AD. Additionally, identifying these deficits may be useful for developing interventions that specifically target these emotional processing problems.