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Dementia and Emotion
Our research here deals with Frontal
Temporal Lobe Dementia (FTLD) patients.
Frontotemporal dementia (FTLD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are two
common dementias that both present significant problems in clinical
diagnosis and patient management. In the early stages of FTLD, many of
symptoms are behavioral, including changes in emotional behavior, social
behavior, and personality. These behavioral symptoms have not been
well-specified and, thus, FTLD often goes unrecognized or misdiagnosed. In
the early stages of AD, cognitive changes (e.g., memory loss) are most
prominent, but changes in socio-emotional behavior and personality may
develop later. As with FTLD, tools for precisely assessing these
socio-emotional and personality changes in AD are lacking.
We propose to apply methods developed in basic behavioral research to
achieve a more comprehensive assessment of emotion, social behavior, and
personality in these two clinical syndromes. This assessment will measure:
(a) actual emotional behavior as it occurs (as opposed to solely relying on
retrospective reports); (b) major emotional functions including emotional
reactivity, emotional regulation, and emotional comprehension/knowledge;
(c) major classes of emotion including negative emotions, positive
emotions, and self-conscious emotions; (d) different contexts in which
emotions occur including when the person is alone and responding to
well-specified stimuli and when the person is in meaningful social contexts
(e.g., interacting with a loved one); (e) multiple indicators of emotion
including subjective experience, expressive behavior, and autonomic nervous
system physiology; (f) changes in emotional functioning that occur over
time; and (g) ancillary changes in personality.
The research addresses three specific aims: (a) to use methods derived from
basic behavioral research to evaluate differences and changes in emotional
reactivity, emotional regulation, emotional knowledge, and personality in
FTLD and AD; (b) to evaluate the relationship that purported genetic markers
of FTLD have with emotional behavior and personality in families with FTLD;
(c) to evaluate changes in social behavior in FTLD and AD patients by
studying dyadic interaction with spouses. Delineating socio-emotional and
personality changes in dementia can contribute to more accurate, earlier
diagnosis; to identifying important subtypes of these disorders; to our
understanding of the relationship between different brain regions and
emotional behavior; and to helping us better deal with the profound impact that
these disorders have on the lives of patients and their families.
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