Discrimination of facial expressions in patients with Parkinson''s disease

• Main Authors: Chia-Yao Lin, 林佳瑤
• Other Authors: Li-Chuan Hsu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/66295477038327264141

碩士 === 中國醫藥大學 === 神經科學與認知科學研究所碩士班 === 100 === Besides movement disorder, patients with Parkinson disease (PD) are revealed to have non-motor deficits. To fast detect or discriminate emotion stimuli is the basic ability of a human, and this ability implies adaptive value. There were two purposes in this study. The first goal was to investigate the discrimination of facial expressions in PD. The second goal was to investigate whether the fast discrimination of facial expressions in PD related to the level of their motor severities. 28 PDs and 28 age-matched healthy controls were recruited in this study, and they were asked to discriminate between positive (happiness) and negative (sadness, fear, anger) faces within the fast emotion discrimination task. The results revealed that PD discriminated all faces longer than healthy controls did, and PD also had less accuracy in the condition of happy and sad faces compared with healthy controls. Furthermore, PD was separated into two subgroups by the cut-off score “35” of UPDRS motor examination (part3). PD with lower level of motor score preformed worse in the condition of sad faces than healthy controls did, and the PD with higher motor score had dysfunctions in processing happy and angry faces. As previous findings, PD in the present study also showed selective deficits in fast emotion discrimination task, especially in processing happy and sad facial expressions. PD with severe motor deficits showed more impairment of discriminating facial expressions.