Increased subjective experience of non-target emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Although laboratory procedures are designed to produce specific emotions, participants often experience mixed emotions (i.e., target and non-target emotions). We examined non-target emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), other neurodegenerative diseases, and healthy controls. Participants watched film clips designed to produce three target emotions. Subjective experience of non-target emotions was assessed and emotional facial expressions were coded. Compared to patients with other neurodegenerative diseases and healthy controls, FTD patients reported more positive and negative non-target emotions, whereas AD patients reported more positive non-target emotions. There were no group differences in facial expressions of non-target emotions. We interpret these findings as reflecting deficits in processing interoceptive and contextual information resulting from neurodegeneration in brain regions critical for creating subjective emotional experience.

Figure 1

Raw scores of subjective experience of 10 emotions (left) and facial expressions of six emotions (right) in response to the amusement, sadness, and disgust film clips. M ± 1 SEM; T = Target emotion; NP = Positive non-target emotions; NN = Negative non-target emotions. The annotation * indicates the mean response of the group was significantly different from zero at the level of p<.05.

Figure 2

Averaged subjective experience (2A) and facial expressions (2B) of emotions across film clips by emotion categories as indexed by raw (left) and corrected (right) scores. Annotations indicate significant or trending between-group differences. M ± 1 SEM. ^†p<.10; ^*p<.05; ^**p<.01; ^***p<.001.