Cognitive processes and emotion perception in frontotemporal dementia

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) can cause cognitive impairments and disrupt the ability to perceive others' emotions. We examined whether cognitive impairments in semantic knowledge and executive function are related to two aspects of emotion perception. Individuals with FTD and healthy controls (N = 110; 33 behavioral variant FTD, 23 non-fluent variant FTD, 30 semantic variant FTD, and 24 controls) completed neuropsychological tests of semantic word knowledge (Peabody Picture Vocabulary, Boston Naming Tests) and executive function (Digit Span Backwards, Trail-Making, Stroop, Design Fluency). They also completed two behavioral tests of emotion perception (1) an emotion labeling task that measured the ability to identify specific emotions (e.g. sad, happy) of characters in films and (2) an emotion tracking task that measures the ability to continuously track the emotional valence (i.e. negative, neutral, positive) of a character in a film. Lower semantic word knowledge was associated with less accurate emotion labeling (but was not associated with emotion tracking). In contrast, lower executive function was associated with lower accuracy in both labeling and tracking. Effects were robust even after accounting for diagnosis, age, sex, global cognition, and dementia severity. Findings reveal how distinct cognitive processes are linked with different aspects of emotion perception in FTD.