New Perspectives on Emotional Processing in People with Symptomatic Huntington's Disease: Impaired Emotion Regulation and Recognition of Emotional Body Language.

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Zarotti, Nicolò Fletcher, Ian Simpson, Jane
Copyright Year	2018
Abstract	Objective Emotion regulation and emotional body language (EBL) recognition represent two fundamental components of emotional processing that have recently seen a considerable surge in research interest, in part due to the role they play in optimizing mental health. This appears to be particularly true for clinical conditions that can profoundly affect emotional functioning. Among these is Huntington's disease (HD), a neurodegenerative disorder that is associated with several psychological difficulties and cognitive impairments, including well-established deficits in facial emotion recognition. However, although the theoretical case for impairments is strong, the current evidence in HD on other components such as emotion regulation and EBL recognition is sparse. Method In this study, it was hypothesized that emotion regulation and recognition of EBL are impaired in people with symptomatic HD, and that these impairments significantly and positively correlate with each other. A between-subjects design was adopted to compare 13 people with symptomatic HD with 12 non-affected controls matched for age and education. Results The results showed that emotion regulation and EBL recognition were significantly impaired in individuals with HD. Moreover, a significant positive correlation was observed between facial and EBL recognition impairments, whereas EBL performance was negatively related to the disease stage. However, emotion regulation and recognition performances were not significantly correlated. Conclusions This investigation represents the first evidence of a deficit of emotion regulation and EBL recognition in individuals with HD. The clinical implications of these findings are explored, and indications for future research are proposed.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1093/arclin/acy085
PubMed reference number	30395151
Journal	Medline
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/128096/1/Quantitative_Manuscript_accepted.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin%2Facy085
Journal	Archives of clinical neuropsychology : the official journal of the National Academy of Neuropsychologists
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article