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

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