Moral processing deficit in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia is associated with facial emotion recognition and brain changes in default mode and salience network areas

Abstract

Introduction: Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is associated with abnormal emotion recognition and moral processing. Methods: We assessed emotion detection, discrimination, matching, selection, and categorization as well as judgments of nonmoral, moral impersonal, moral personal low- and high-conflict scenarios. Results: bvFTD patients gave more utilitarian responses on low-conflict personal moral dilemmas. There was a significant correlation between a facial emotion processing measure derived through principal component analysis and utilitarian responses on low-conflict personal scenarios in the bvFTD group (controlling for MMSE-score and syntactic abilities). Voxel-based morphometric multiple regression analysis in the bvFTD group revealed a significant association between the proportion of utilitarian responses on personal low-conflict dilemmas and gray matter volume in ventromedial prefrontal areas (pheight