Speciality Clinical Neuropsychology
Library of the School of Health Sciences

2020-07-15

2020

Kampoureli Christina-Niki

Σωκράτης Παπαγεωργίου, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ, Επιβλέπων
Κωνσταντίνος Πόταγας, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ
Λεωνίδας Στεφανής, Καθηγητής, Ιατρική Σχολή, ΕΚΠΑ

Selective attention and emotional processing in Parkinson’s Disease

English

Selective attention and emotional processing in Parkinson’s Disease

Background: Patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) apart from motor symptomatology exhibit cognitive deficits in executive function and visuospatial ability. Additionally, findings indicate that there is a specific emotional processing deficit that is closely related to selective attention mechanisms.
Objectives: In this study, we attempted to explore the relationship between selective attention and emotional processing by employing two experimental tasks that assessed two different aspects of selective attention: visual search and inhibition.
Method: We compared the performance of 29 PD patients and 29 Healthy Controls (HC) in neutral and emotional conditions of the Visual Search task and the Emotional Stroop task.
Results: In the Visual Search task, both PD patients and HC exhibited higher accuracy scores in the emotional faces set compared to the neutral; PD patients also demonstrated a global visual search ability impairment that was not specific to emotional faces by being less accurate across conditions compared to HC. In the Emotional Stroop task, PD patients showed specific valence-related latencies during the colour-naming of negative words compared to neutral, but not positive words. On the contrary, HC showed the opposite pattern, with reduced colour-naming times of positive and negative words compared to neutral; a finding indicative of enhanced emotion regulation and inhibitory control of task-irrelevant emotional information.
Discussion: Our results suggest that emotional processing deficits related to selective attention become evident only in settings that engage inhibitory control and are absent in settings employing visual search ability. A possible explanation for the colour-naming latencies in negative words demonstrated by PD patients, involves the lack of top-down inhibitory control, as a result of impaired dopaminergic regulation in key areas for task-related emotional conflict resolution.

Health Sciences

Parkinson’s Disease, Emotional processing, Selective attention, Visual search, Inhibition

No

0

Yes

54

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https://pergamos.lib.uoa.gr/uoa/dl/object/2919447