Author(s): Domenico Passafiume, Nicoletta Caputi, Lucia Serenella De Federicis, Marta Colantonio and Dina Di Giacomo
Objective: Patients affected by Alzheimer’s disease show deficits in emotion processing and inappropriate social behaviors during emotional situations were clinically observed. Aim of our study was to explore the ability of patients with Alzheimer’s disease in ascribing emotional meaning to environmental or human emotional sounds, to understand if environmental sounds are impaired in their meaning or in their emotional attribute.
Methods: Thirty participants were included in the study. The sample comprised two groups: 1) 15 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s disease; 2) 15 healthy comparison matched with the experimental group.
Participants were submitted to a neuropsychological evaluation that included standardized (Mini-Mental State Examination, Boston Naming Test and the Token Test) and experimental tasks. The experimental battery was composed of four tasks: the Noise Recognition Task, the Emotion Naming Task, the Emotion Discrimination Task and the Sound and Emotion Association Task. These tasks were chosen to mirror ecologic situations, in which patients have to infer feelings elicited by sounds.
Results: Analysis of variance showed that patients affected by Alzheimer’s disease had significantly worse performance than healthy comparison subjects (p <.001) in the experimental battery.
Conclusion: The findings suggested, as expected, that Alzheimer’s Disease patients was less efficient than healthy comparison subjects in processing emotion, even if the two groups showed a similar trend. When patients have to associate visual and auditory stimuli, they have more difficulties in establishing among facial expressions the one to which the sound belong, rather than in identifying the meaning of the facial expressions or of the sounds.
