Emotion perception in Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorder in old age.

Phillips, L. H., Scott, C., Henry, J. D., Mowat, D., & Bell, J. S. (2010). Emotion perception in Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorder in old age. Psychology and Aging, 25(1), 38-47. doi:10.1037/a0017369

Chapter 16 covers different behavioral and neurological disorders that result from the misbehavior of the critical part of our body called the brain. The misbehavior of the brain could result from old age, cell death, loss of neural connections, or genetic errors. The topic I chose to cover was Alzheimer’s diseases. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive form of dementia, the loss of brain function that worsens over time and affects memory, thinking, and behavior. The title of the article I chose was “Emotion perception in Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorder in old age.” The study was a comparison between healthy older age adults, adults with Alzheimer’s disease, and adults with late life mood disorders that aimed to gain a better knowledge of emotional perception between these groups. The researchers gave the participants four different types of tasks to measure emotion perception and facial recognition: emotion labeling, emotion discrimination, executive function, and the Benton facial identity recognition task. Researchers found that compared with the healthy group of older adults, adults with Alzheimer’s disease were impaired when matched on perception of emotions from faces. Results also showed that participants with Alzheimer’s disease had difficulty labeling emotions on faces from a standard chart when the intensity of the faces was at one hundred percent, and the difficulty of identifying emotions reduced slightly when the intensity level of the faces was at seventy-five percent (more subtle). Researchers also saw that participants with Alzheimer’s disease and late mood disorder were both more likely to label an emotion as disgust when asked to label a facial emotion. The ability to recognize facial emotion was correlated with self-rated quality of life in the older adults and shows that emotional coding is potentially important to the well-being and life quality of those adults.