Emotion processing in Parkinson's disease: a three-level study on recognition, representation, and regulation

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterised by well-known motor symptoms, whereas the presence of cognitive non-motor symptoms, such as emotional disturbances, is still underestimated. One of the major problems in studying emotion deficits in PD is an atomising approach that does not take into account different levels of emotion elaboration. Our study addressed the question of whether people with PD exhibit difficulties in one or more specific dimensions of emotion processing, investigating three different levels of analyses, that is, recognition, representation, and regulation.

Thirty-two consecutive medicated patients with PD and 25 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. Participants performed a three-level analysis assessment of emotional processing using quantitative standardised emotional tasks: the Ekman 60-Faces for emotion recognition, the full 36-item version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) for emotion representation, and the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) for emotion regulation.

Regarding emotion recognition, patients obtained significantly worse scores than controls in the total score of Ekman 60-Faces but not in any other basic emotions. For emotion representation, patients obtained significantly worse scores than controls in the RME experimental score but no in the RME gender control task. Finally, on emotion regulation, PD and controls did not perform differently at TAS-20 and no specific differences were found on TAS-20 subscales. The PD impairments on emotion recognition and representation do not correlate with dopamine therapy, disease severity, or with the duration of illness. These results are independent from other cognitive processes, such as global cognitive status and executive function, or from psychiatric status, such as depression, anxiety or apathy.

These results may contribute to better understanding of the emotional problems that are often seen in patients with PD and the measures used to test these problems, in particular on the use of different versions of the RME task.