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Emotion in
Neurodegenerative Disorders
Our research in this area is part of an ongoing
collaboration with the Memory and Aging Center (MAC) at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dementia and
Emotion Study (DEMO)
This work 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.
Pseudobulbar
Affect in Non-Demented ALS (PANDA)
Pseudobulbar Affect occurs in a subset of Amyotrophic Lateral
Sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease) patients and refers to the
uncontrollable expression of laughter and/or crying. The purpose of this
work is to study the factors that initiate these episodes, the
physiological impact on patients, and how neural activation during these
pathological episodes compares to normal laughing and crying.
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