Assessment of facial emotions recognition in aging and dementia. The development of a new tool

doi:10.1016/j.biomag.2014.01.003

Biomedicine & Aging Pathology

Volume 4, Issue 2, April–June 2014, Pages 91-94

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biomag.2014.01.003 Get rights and content

Abstract

The recognition of emotions from facial expressions is a basic human aptitude. The aging process is related with a decrease of this ability, particularly in the recognition of negative emotions. This decrease is more prominent in the context of dementia. Despite the growing of researches on emotion recognition, there is a lack of instruments capable of identifying individual differences regarding aging and dementia. This work aims to determine the psychometric properties of a facial emotion recognition task (Gandra-BARTA). The sample is composed by three groups: Young Adults (YA) group (n = 12); Old Adults (OA) group (n = 17); Alzheimer's Disease (AD) group (n = 26), made up of subjects with diagnosis of probable AD. The Gandra-BARTA showed good internal consistency. In comparison to the YA, the OA group took more time to complete Gandra-BARTA, had less correct emotional identifications and they have under-recognized facial expressions of rage and neutral emotions. On the other hand, the AD group showed worst performance on every aspect of the Gandra-BARTA when compared to the OA group, except in the identification of sadness and fear. A cutoff score of 24 correct recognitions on Gandra-BARTA differentiate OA from AD subjects with a sensibility of 100% and a specificity of 88.5%. The Gandra-BARTA revealed good internal consistency making it a reliable instrument to assess the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. It also proved to be sensitive to changes in aging and dementia with high discriminant validity for AD.

Introduction

In the last years, there has been an increase in the number of researches in the field of emotions. Most of the studies are focused on the neuroanatomical grounds of the recognition of emotions from facial expressions [1], [2], particularly of the basic emotions such as happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness [3]. The recognition of emotions from facial expressions is a basic human aptitude [4] and it is related to the ability to correctly perceive and understand the emotional state of others [5]. This ability has a key role in the social interaction [6] because it provides the possibility to infer and recognize emotional states based on no-verbal signs [4] and it precedes the understanding of the emotion and the emotional regulation of the subject [5].

The aging process is related with a decrease of this ability [7], [8], particularly in the recognition of negative emotions [9] such as sadness [10], anger and fear [7], [11]. This decrease is intimately related to neurobiological changes in aging, namely the reduction of cortical volume of the medial temporal and inferior frontal lobes [12], [13]. Several studies have pointed to the decrease of the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions in the context of dementia, especially in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Fear and sadness are the most affected [14] while the recognition of disgust seems to be unimpaired [15]. These features in emotion recognition may be related to atrophies and neuropathological lesions of limbic areas like the amygdala, temporal and frontal cortexes [16].

Despite the vast number of researches on emotion recognition, there is a lack of instruments capable of identifying individual differences [5] regarding aging and dementia. Therefore, this work aims to determine the psychometric properties of a facial emotion recognition task, composed by 59 photographs derived from the Bolton Affective Recognition Tri-Stimulus Approach (BARTA) [17]. The reliability (internal consistency) and discriminant validity will be determined as well as its correlation with cognitive functioning and depression.

Section snippets

Subjects and methods

The sample is composed of three groups: Young Adults (YA) group (n = 12), with ages ranging between 31 and 39 years old; Old Adults (OA) group (n = 17) with ages ranging between 60 and 82 years old; Alzheimer's Disease (AD) group (n = 26), made up of subjects with diagnosis of probable AD according to the NINCDS-ADRDA criteria [18], with ages ranging between 60 and 86 years old. The subjects of the YA and OA groups does not present any subjective complain of memory loss and they are autonomous in basic

Results

The Cronbach's alpha for the Gandra-BARTA was .86.

The description of the results obtained by the groups on Gandra-BARTA is presented in Table 2. Comparisons between YA/OA and OA/AD are showed in Table 3, Table 4. In comparison to the YA, the OA group took more time to complete the emotional recognition task, had less correct emotional identifications and they have under-recognized facial expressions of rage and neutral emotions. On the other hand, the AD group showed worst performance on every

Discussion

The present work aimed to establish some psychometric properties of a facial emotion database: Gandra-BARTA. The reliability (internal consistency) and discriminant validity according to age and dementia were determined as well as its correlations with cognitive functioning (MoCA) and depression (GDS).

The Gandra-BARTA revealed good internal consistency making it a reliable instrument to assess the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. The time taken to accomplish the task

Disclosure of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest concerning this article.

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Original articleAssessment of facial emotions recognition in aging and dementia. The development of a new tool

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Subjects and methods

Results

Discussion

Disclosure of interest

Neuroimage

Neuroimage

Biol Psychol

Curr Opin Neurobiol

Neuropsychologia

Neurosci Biobehav Rev

Neuropsychologia

Psychiatry Res

J Affect Disord

Strong evidence for universals in facial expressions: a reply to Russell's mistaken critique

Psychol Bull