Affective judgments by patients with Parkinson’s disease or chronic progressive multiple sclerosis

Abstract

Both patients with Parkinson’s disease or chronic progressive multiple sclerosis and neurologically normal controls judged the emotional expression of faces from a standardized set of photographs. Both groups of patients were impaired on the affective judgment task and on Benton’s Facial Recognition Test. Multiple regression analysis showed that performance on the facial recognition test accounted for 44% of the variance in performance on the affective judgment task, whereas scores on the Beck Depression Inventory did not predict the accuracy of affective judgments. Inaccurate judgments of affect by patients with Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis appear to have been secondary to their impaired ability to discriminate details of facial stimuli. © 1989, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.