碩士 / 高雄醫學大學 / 心理學研究所 / 96 / Objective: In the early stage of Dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT) , the pathological lesion preferentially affects temporal lobe regions, which represent important structures in memory and emotion processing. However, most research have focused on cognitive dysfunction at present. This study investigated recognition of facial emotion expression in DAT and attempted to find the specific impairment of the facial emotion. Furthermore, the association between these specific deficits and the neuropathology stages of DAT were explored.
Methods: Participants were included 26 healthy elderly, 26 patients with very early DAT, 24 patients with mild DAT and 5 patients with moderate DAT. After matching age and sex, a variety of neuropsychological tests were implemented for every participants, including Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI), Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), Benton’s Visual Form Discrimination, and Morphed Facial Emotion Expression Test.
Results: The results showed both the main effects of the emotion and dementia severity factors were significant, and the interaction effect of emotional categories and dementia severity was also significant. After analyzing the post hoc comparisons, we could find the DAT patient impaired in recognizing the fearful, sadness, disgust and anger facial emotion, and the performance of recognition the happiness and surprise were preserved.
Conclusion: These data suggested that DAT patients had deficits in recognizing facial emotions of sadness and anger, which were consistent with the neuropathology stages of DAT which respectively impaired in the very early and mild dementia. Nevertheless the severity of dementia did not influence the ability of recognition of happiness and surprise. In clinical practice, we could explain these deficits to caregivers to alleviate their psychological distress.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/096KMC05071004 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Chia-Ling Hsu, 許嘉玲 |
| Contributors | Ching-Kuan Liu, 劉景寬 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | zh-TW |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 108 |
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