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Updated: Jul 9, 2026

Exploring the Use of Isolated Expressions and Film Clips to Evaluate Emotion Recognition by People with Traumatic Brain Injury
Published on: May 15, 2016
Huntington's disease impairs recognition of angry and instrumental body language
Beatrice de Gelder1, Jan Van den Stock, Ruth de Diego Balaguer
1Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown 02129, United States. degelder@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
Abstract:
Patients with Huntington's disease (HD) exhibit motor impairments as well as cognitive and emotional deficits. So far impairments in the ability to recognize emotional stimuli have mostly been investigated by using facial expressions and emotional voices. Other important emotional signals are provided by the whole body. To investigate the impact of motor deficits on body recognition and the relation between motor disorders and emotion perception deficits, we tested recognition of emotional body language (instrumental, angry, fearful and sad) in 19 HD patients and their matched controls with a nonverbal whole body expression matching task. Results indicate that HD patients are impaired in recognizing both instrumental and angry whole body postures. Furthermore, the body language perception deficits are correlated with measures of motor deficit. Taken together the results suggest a close relationship between emotion recognition (specifically anger) and motor abilities.
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