Abnormal Emotional Word Ratings in Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Blunted facial expressions and diminished expressions of emotional prosody associated with Parkinson's disease (PD) could be attributed to motor rigidity/akinesia. Although impaired recognition of emotional faces and prosody in PD suggests emotional dysfunction is not entirely motor-efferent, comprehension might depend upon imitation with motor feedback. Thus, to learn if patients with PD have an emotional conceptual defect, we examined their ratings for the emotional connotations of words on a 1–9 scale for valence and arousal. When compared to control participants the valence (positive–negative) and arousal (excited–calm) ratings of the PD patients were blunted, but their ratings of the control expense words (expensive–cheap) were not. These blunted emotion ratings suggest that patients with PD have a degradation of their emotional conceptual–semantic system.

KEYWORDS:

• Parkinson's disease
• emotional expressions
• emotional comprehension
• affective semantics

This study was in part supported by The Memory Disorder Clinics-State of Florida, the Research Service of the Veteran's Affairs Medical Center, Gainesville, and the Department of Defense. We thank Adela Mitchell for help with this research.