Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-46n74 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-09T09:08:43.311Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Error profiles of facial emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2023

Kimberly Gressie
Affiliation:
Faculty of Medicine, The University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia
Fiona Kumfor
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney, School of Psychology, Sydney, Australia
Her Teng
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney, School of Psychology, Sydney, Australia
David Foxe
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney, School of Psychology, Sydney, Australia
Emma Devenney
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney, Central Clinical School, Sydney, Australia
Rebekah M. Ahmed
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney, Central Clinical School, Sydney, Australia
Olivier Piguet*
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney, School of Psychology, Sydney, Australia
*
Correspondence should be addressed to: Olivier Piguet, School of Psychology and Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia. Phone: +61 2 9114 4144. Email: olivier.piguet@sydney.edu.au

Abstract

Objectives:

To identify the patterns of errors in facial emotion recognition in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) subtypes compared with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and healthy controls.

Design:

Retrospective analysis.

Setting:

Participants were recruited from FRONTIER, the frontotemporal dementia research group at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Participants:

A total of 356 participants (behavioral-variant FTD (bvFTD): 62, semantic dementia (SD)-left: 29, SD-right: 14, progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA): 21, AD: 76, controls: 90) were included.

Measurements:

Facial emotion recognition was assessed using the Facial Affect Selection Task, a word-face matching task measuring recognition of the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise), as well as neutral emotion, portrayed by black and white faces.

Results:

Overall, all clinical groups performed significantly worse than controls with the exception of the PNFA subgroup (p = .051). The SD-right group scored worse than all other clinical groups (all p values < .027) and the bvFTD subgroup performed worse than the PNFA group (p < .001). The most frequent errors were in response to the facial emotions disgust (26.1%) and fear (22.9%). The primary error response to each target emotion was identified; patterns of errors were similar across all clinical groups.

Conclusions:

Facial emotion recognition is impaired in FTD and AD compared to healthy controls. Within FTD, bvFTD and SD-right are particularly impaired. Dementia groups cannot be distinguished based on error responses alone. Implications for future clinical diagnosis and research are discussed.

Information

Type
Original Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Psychogeriatric Association
Figure 0

Table 1. Demographic characteristics and cognitive performance for the clinical groups (AD, bvFTD, SD-left, SD-right, and PNFA) and healthy controls

Figure 1

Figure 1. Facial Affect Selection Task (FAST) total score across groups. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001; significant difference between SD-Right and AD (a) and SD-Left (b). AD = Alzheimer’s disease. bvFTD = behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia. PNFA = progressive non-fluent aphasia. SD = semantic dementia.

Figure 2

Table 2. Total and accuracy (%) scores on the Facial Affect Selection Task (FAST) across clinical groups and healthy controls

Figure 3

Figure 2. Heat maps of error matrix by group. Numbers show total number of responses to the target emotion. Circles show the primary error responses (PERs). AD = Alzheimer’s disease. bvFTD = behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia. SD = semantic dementia. PNFA = progressive non-fluent aphasia.

Figure 4

Figure 3. Primary error responses (PERs) across study groups. The first column represents the target emotion, the second column the PER, followed, in the third column, by the group. * = significantly more PERs in SD-right than in all the other groups (p < .05). # = significantly more PERs in bvFTD and SD-left than in PNFA (p < .05). AD = Alzheimer’s disease. BvFTD = behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia. HC = healthy controls. SD = semantic dementia. PNFA = progressive non-fluent aphasia.