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. 2025 Sep;19(3):411-424.
doi: 10.1111/jnp.12410. Epub 2024 Dec 26.

Are patients with Parkinson's disease impaired in the recognition of emotion's authenticity?

Agnese Anzani  1 , Stefano Zago  2 , Teresa Difonzo  2 , Cristina Scarpazza  3   4 , Nadia Bolognini  5   6 , Giulia Franco  2 , Alessio Difonzo  2 , Maria Cristina Saetti  1   2
Affiliations

Are patients with Parkinson's disease impaired in the recognition of emotion's authenticity?

Agnese Anzani et al. J Neuropsychol. 2025 Sep.

Abstract

In recognising emotions expressed by others, one can make use of both embodied cognition and mechanisms that do not necessarily require activation of the limbic system, such as evoking from memory the meaning of morphological features of the observed face. Instead, we believe that the recognition of the authenticity of an emotional expression is primarily based on embodied cognition, for which the mirror system would play a significant role. To verify this hypothesis, we submitted 20 parkinsonian patients and 20 healthy control subjects to the Emotional Authenticity Recognition test, a novel test using dynamic stimuli to evaluate the ability to recognise emotions and their authenticity. Analysis of variance of the test scores shows that Parkinsonian patients perform worse than controls when they had to recognise the authenticity of emotions, although they are able to identify them. Our results confirm a deficit in the recognition of the authenticity of emotions in patients with Parkinson's disease attributable to the disruption of extrapiramidal limbic circuit between ventral striatum and orbitomesial-prefrontal cortex.

Keywords: Parkinson's disease; embodied cognition; emotion authenticity; facial emotion recognition; human mirror system.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
An example of emotion recognition test stimuli: Happiness expression, authentic (left) and posed (right).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Experimental procedure of the emotion recognition test: Emotion presentation (e.g., posed happiness) and experimental questions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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