Emotional Decoding Abilities Do Not Influence Neuropsychiatric Disturbances in Patients With Frontotemporal Dementia

The ability to accurately recognize emotional information belongs to very important interpersonal communication skills in humans. Disturbance of emotional processing is present in behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), and the severity of pathological behavior may be linked to misunderstanding of other people's emotions. In our study, we examined hypothesis that patients with worse ability to decode emotions have more behavioral and psychopathological disturbances--the most challenging manifestations of dementia--than those who decode emotions better. We were not able to prove this hypothesis. The ability to decode emotions in patients with bvFTD did not influenced their behavior.