Objective: The aim of the current study is to directly compare performance in recognition of facial and bodily emotions.

Background: Patients with Parkinson´s disease (PD)  show impaired ability to recognize emotions which may lead to difficulties in social functioning. Emotion recognition from faces is impaired, even though, contradictory results have been reported [1]. Ability to recognize emotions solely from static bodily expressions is largely understudied area.

Method: Twenty-six non-demented patients with mild to moderate PD on dopamine replacement therapy and 27 age-, gender- and education-matched healthy controls were recruited. Penn Emotion Recognition Test (ER-40) was used to evaluate facial emotions recognition. For body expressions, we constructed a complementary test (BR-40) using the stimulus set with body emotions with a blurred face of the actor. Both tasks were composed of 40 pictures including expressions of 4 emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) and neutral emotion presented in randomised order. All participants were also tested with a comprehensive neuropsychological battery and rated with MDS-UPDRS by a movement disorder specialist. Student T-test was used for group comparison and repeated measures analysis of variance for individual emotions was applied.

Results: We found significant differences in the recognition of emotions from bodies between PD patients and healthy controls (t=2.168, p=0.035, d=0.608). Interestingly, differences in facial expressions between groups did not reach statistical significance(t=1.913, p=0.062, d=0.537). We did not find interactions between groups and type of emotions, thus based on our results, both groups share similar pattern of performance. Nevertheless, the accuracy of emotion recognition for particular emotions varied across types (sadness from bodily emotions was the most misidentified in PD) . Face and bodily emotion recognition was significantly associated with deficits in various aspects of neurocognition in PD. Neither ER-40 nor BR-40 correlated with clinical parameters of PD (disease duration, MDS-UPDRS, levodopa equivalent doses).

Conclusion: We found that for patients with PD, bodily emotions are more difficult to recognize with clear deficit in this ability. Cognitive functioning is important for sucessful recognition of emotions across modalities (face and body).

References: Argaud, S., et al., Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: A review and new hypotheses.Mov Disord, 2018. 33(4): p. 554-567.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/bodily-and-facial-emotion-recognition-in-parkinsons-disease/