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The Dynamic Affect Recognition Test: Construction and Validation in Neurodegenerative Syndromes.
Katherine P Rankin1, Hulya Ulugut1, Anneliese Radke1
1University of California, San Francisco, USA.
Assessment
|July 16, 2026
Summary
The Dynamic Affect Recognition Test (DART) helps identify emotion deficits in people with dementia (PWD). This practical, validated tool shows promise for diagnosing conditions like semantic behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (sbvFTD).
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Gerontology
Background:
- Emotion identification deficits are common in dementia.
- Validated clinical tools for assessing these deficits are needed.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and validate the Dynamic Affect Recognition Test (DART) for assessing emotion identification in persons with dementia (PWD).
- To evaluate DART's diagnostic accuracy across different dementia syndromes, particularly semantic behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (sbvFTD).
Main Methods:
- Administered DART to 257 early-stage PWD and 115 healthy controls (HC).
- Utilized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to correlate DART performance with brain atrophy.
- Assessed DART's association with other emotion identification measures and real-world socioemotional sensitivity.
Main Results:
- PWD performed worse on DART than HC.
- sbvFTD patients showed the lowest DART scores.
- DART demonstrated high diagnostic specificity (AUCs ≥82%) for distinguishing dementia syndromes, especially those with socioemotional impairment.
- DART performance correlated with atrophy in right-sided emotion processing regions (insula, temporal pole, caudate head).
Conclusions:
- DART is a brief, clinically practical, video-based tool for assessing emotion identification in PWD.
- DART accurately reflects the neuroanatomy of emotion processing and shows strong diagnostic potential for dementia subtypes.
