Alexithymia Is Associated With Deficits in Visual Search for Emotional Faces in Clinical Depression

Emotion Recognition in Multiple System Atrophy: An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study

OBJECTIVE

Emotional processing is a core feature of social interactions and has been well studied in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD), albeit with contradictory.

RESULTS

. However, these studies excluded patients with atypical parkinsonism, such as multiple system atrophy (MSA). The objective of this exploratory study was to provide better insights into emotion processing in patients with MSA using eye tracking data.

METHODS

We included 21 MSA patients, 15 PD patients and 19 matched controls in this study. Participants performed a dynamic and a static emotion recognition task, and gaze fixations were analyzed in different areas of interest. Participants underwent neuropsychological testing and assessment of depression and alexithymia.

RESULTS

MSA patients were less accurate in recognizing anger than controls (p = 0.02) and had overall fewer fixations than controls (p = 0.001). In the static task, MSA patients had fewer fixations (p < 0.001) and a longer time to first fixation (p = 0.026) on the eye region. Furthermore, MSA patients had a longer fixation duration overall than PD patients (p = 0.004) and longer fixations on the nose than controls (p = 0.005). Alexithymia scores were higher in MSA patients compared to controls (p = 0.038).

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrated impaired recognition of anger in MSA patients compared to HCs. Fewer and later fixations on the eyes along with a center bias suggest avoidance of eye contact, which may be a characteristic gaze behavior in MSA patients.

Widowhood Impairs Emotional Cognition Among Elderly

Background

The negative impacts of spousal bereavement on the emotional health of the elderly (e.g., depression and anxiety) have been revealed. However, whether widowhood impairs emotional cognition among the elderly is less known. The purpose of this study is to reveal the emotional cognitive deficits among the widowed elderly.

Methods

In this study, we recruited 44 widowed elderly (WE) and 44 elder couples (non-widowed elderly, NWE) and examined their emotional cognition including attention and visual working memory, which were measured by the visual search task and delayed-match-to-sample task, respectively. Three kinds of emotional faces (i.e., sad, angry, and happy) were adopted as the attentional or mnemonic targets.

Results

It revealed that WE had a general deficit in search efficiency across emotional types, while they showed mnemonic deficits in negative faces but not positive faces. Furthermore, the modeling analysis revealed that the level of depression or state anxiety of the elderly moderated the effects of widowhood on the deficits of mnemonic processing, i.e., the deficits were only evident among WE with the high level of depression or state anxiety.

Conclusion

These findings reveal the attentional deficits in sad, angry, and happy faces and the mnemonic deficits in sad and angry faces among elderly who suffer from widowhood and point out the important role of emotional problems such as depression and state anxiety in modulating these emotional cognitive deficits.