Perception of affect in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type
M. S. Albert, C. Cohen and E. Koff
Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston 02114.
The ability to perceive affect was examined in 19 patients with Alzheimer's
disease and in 19 control subjects. Nine tasks were given. All participants
were asked to recognize facial emotion, to provide verbal labels of facial
emotion, and to identify emotion portrayed in drawings or in verbal
descriptions of emotional situations. The results indicate that there are
significant differences between patients with Alzheimer's disease and
control subjects on all of the tasks. However, when test scores were
adjusted for the cognitive abilities of the subjects, few of the tests
continue to differentiate the groups. These results suggest that the
deficits of patients with Alzheimer's disease on perception of affect tasks
are likely to be the result of their cognitive defects and not the result
of a primary impairment in the perception of emotion.
