Processing of Emotional Cues in Patients with Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type

Previous research on patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) has focused primarily on intellectual and memory deficits. The present study investigated another aspect of cognitive functioning, that of processing of emotional cues. Subjects included 30 DAT patients and 13 normal controls who were asked to identify emotional expressions in pictured faces and in tone of tape recorded sentences. A battery of neuropsychological tests was also administered. DAT patients were impaired on all tasks as compared to controls of comparable age, education and previous occupation. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the two emotional tasks were the most highly correlated of all the tasks for the patient sample. This relationship is discussed as validating the emotional tasks as measures of emotional cue processing rather than reflecting deficits based only on other task dimensions.