Psychiatry research
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Psychiatry research · Aug 2011
Emotion recognition and experience in Huntington's disease: is there a differential impairment?
Findings on affective processing deficits in Huntington's disease (HD) have been inconsistent. It is still not clear whether HD patients are afflicted by specific deficits in emotion recognition and experience. We tested 28 symptomatic HD patients and presented them with pictures depicting facial expressions of emotions (Karolinska-Set) and with affective scenes (International Affective Picture System; IAPS). ⋯ When judging affective scenes for the elicitation of happiness, disgust and fear, HD patients had a tendency to estimate them as more intense than controls. This finding points to a differential impairment in emotion recognition and emotion experience in HD. We found no significant correlations between emotion experience/recognition ratings and CAG repeats, symptom duration and UHDRS Motor Assessment in the patient group.