In a new study, researchers found a special impairment of moral emotions in patients with frontotemporal dementia.
This finding may help develop a new approach for early, sensitive and specific diagnosis of the disease.
The research was conducted by a team from the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris (France) and at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.
Frontotemporal dementia is a brain disease caused by degenerative changes in anterior regions of the brain.
Patients with the disease have behavioral problems such as a progressive apathy, loss of interest, social withdrawal, loss of inhibition and the processing of emotions.
Previous research has shown that these patients demonstrate impairment of emotion recognition and lose the ability to figure out the mental states of others.
In the new study, the team focused on a specific kind of emotions called moral emotions, which are crucial for human interactions.
Moral emotions can be defined as effective experiences promoting cooperation and group cohesion including emotions such as admiration, shame or pity.
They are different from other emotions in that they are strongly linked to the cultural context, moral rules, and innate moral representations.
The researchers developed a test to assess moral emotions.
The test is composed of 42 scenarios for which the person has to select, out of 4 response possibilities, the feeling s/he has in the scenario situation.
They tested 22 patients with frontotemporal dementia, 15 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and 45 healthy people.
The results showed that moral emotions are much more impaired than emotions without moral valence in people with frontotemporal dementia compared with healthy people.
In contrast, patients with Alzheimer’s disease had no impairment as compared to healthy people.
The finding shows that patients with frontotemporal dementia have a very profound change in moral emotions.
The novel test tool could provide an early, sensitive and specific marker for the diagnosis of the disease and distinguish it from Alzheimer’s disease.
The lead authors of the study are Marc Teichmann and Carole Azuar.
The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
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