Article

While Parkinson's disease (PD) has traditionally been described as a movement
disorder, there is growing evidence of cognitive and social deficits associated
with the disease. However, few studies have looked at multi-modal social
cognitive deficits in patients with PD. We studied lateralization of both
prosodic and facial emotion recognition (the ability to recognize emotional
valence from either tone of voice or from facial expressions) in PD. The
Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS) is a well-validated test of human
emotion processing that has been used to study emotion recognition in several
major clinical populations, but never before in PD. We administered an
abbreviated version of CATS (CATS-A) to 24 medicated PD participants and 12
age-matched controls. PD participants were divided into two groups, based on side
of symptom onset and unilateral motor symptom severity: left-affected (N = 12) or
right-affected PD participants (N = 12). CATS-A is a computer-based button press
task with eight subtests relevant to prosodic and facial emotion recognition.
Left-affected PD participants with inferred predominant right-hemisphere
pathology were expected to have difficulty with prosodic emotion recognition
since there is evidence that the processing of prosodic information is
right-hemisphere dominant. We found that facial emotion recognition was preserved
in the PD group, however, left-affected PD participants had specific impairment
in prosodic emotion recognition, especially for sadness. Selective deficits in
prosodic emotion recognition suggests that (1) hemispheric effects in emotion
recognition may contribute to the impairment of emotional communication in a
subset of people with PD and (2) the coordination of neural networks needed to
decipher temporally complex social cues may be specifically disrupted in PD.
CI - Copyright (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS