Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions in Alzheimer's Disease

Literature has been discussing the perception of emotional facial expressions in elderly suffering from Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Some authors suggest that deficits occur due to visuospatial problems; others suggest that the difficulty is related to emotional processing; still others argue that this perceptive deficit is secondary to dementia evolution. This study aimed to investigate the neuropsychological aspects of the perception of facial emotional expression by applying the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III) test, as well as a software named Perception Test of Facial Emotional Expressions (TEPEF), which analyzes the perception of emotional faces by the elderly. The results suggest that WAIS-III was sensible in discriminating the differences between experimental and control groups, but presented little specificity. The TEPEF presented consistency to evaluate facial expressions of happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise and anger. Furthermore, it showed that the perception of happiness in the elderly with mild AD is relatively preserved. The expressions more easily perceived -such as happiness and sadness - had correlations with few WAIS-III subtests. Therefore, the study concluded that the losses are related to negative emotions evidenced by the perception of emotional faces, which requires continued supervision for the elderly with these changes.