Objective: The purpose was to examine facial emotional expression in individuals with PD and in healthy control (HC) subjects (Ss) using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman & Friesen, 1978).

Background: Disturbances in emotional expression present clinical challenges for the treatment and care of individuals with disorders of the central nervous system. Impaired deficits in emotional expression are not limited to psychiatric disorders but can also be observed in people with neurological disorders (e.g., PD). The majority of the research on facial expression in PD has focused on discrete emotions (e.g., sadness). In the current study, we examined smiling behavior, a psychosocially important type of facial expression, and included both Duchenne (associated with “felt” emotion) and non-Duchenne (produced deliberately in social settings) smiles.

Methods: Data were obtained from individuals with idiopathic PD (n = 45) and HCs (n = 11; age-, education-, & ethnicity-matched). Ss were videotaped while producing emotional monologues via procedures from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992). The final 60s of the happiness monologue were evaluated for Action Unit occurrence, intensity, and onset duration using FACS. Inter-rater reliability was established for a subset (20%) of the data.

Results: In terms of frequency, Mann-Whitney U tests showed that HCs had significantly higher (p<.05 or trend-level) mean values than PDs for 3 of the 4 variables examined. For smile intensity, there were significant or trend-level findings for 2 of 4 comparisons, with HCs displaying higher intensity than PDs. For duration, there were no significant group differences. Because there were relatively more men in the PD (73.3%) than the HC group (36.4%) and since gender can affect emotional expression, the data were also examined separately by gender. In light of the small number of Ss in some groups, patterns in the data were described. In general, HCs had higher values than PDs.

Conclusions: Overall, individuals with PD showed reduced frequency and lower intensity of smiling behavior when compared to HCs. These findings are consistent with previous research using both FACS and subjective ratings (e.g., Simons, Ellgring, & Pasqualini, 2003). Of note, findings from the current study are preliminary due to small sample sizes with respect to gender; thus, more of our data need to be analyzed via FACS.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/facial-expressivity-in-parkinsons-disease-pd-via-an-examination-of-smiling-behavior-preliminary-findings/