Introduction: Although there are plenty of studies on affective or cognitive theory of mind (ToM) in Alzheimer's Disease (AD), few have investigated both these dimensions and even fewer have examined the ability to identify an emotion from context in relation to the executive function deficit. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the deficit of affective and cognitive ToM in AD patients in the light of their executive function deficit. We were especially interested in the ability to attribute emotions to a character from a context and the ability to recognize facial expressions and to understand social clumsiness.Method: Twenty-eight mild AD patients and 33 healthy participants completed two sessions, one involving neuropsychological tests evaluating the executive functions, and the other comprising three tasks (Facial Expression Attribution, Facial Expression Recognition, Faux Pas test) assessing affective and cognitive ToM.Results: Compared to the healthy participants, the AD patients were impaired in the recognition of shame, anger and the neutral expression. They had difficulties in inferring surprise and disgust from visual context in situations where no facial expression was available, and were also impaired in all aspects of the Faux Pas test. Globally, and independently of the Group factor, performance in the three ToM tasks was correlated with performance in the backward span test, and the significant proportion of variance in performance in the Facial Expression Recognition and Faux Pas test was explained by the performance in backward span test. However, separate analyses did not show any significant correlations for the AD patients.Conclusions: Our results suggest an impairment of affective and cognitive ToM in AD patients. This impairment is selective as it concerns only some emotions. Considering these results with caution, it is possible that, patients' working memory difficulties explain, at least in part, their difficulties in ToM tasks.

中文翻译：

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阿尔茨海默氏病的情感和认知心理理论：执行功能的作用。

简介：尽管对阿尔茨海默氏病（AD）的情感或认知心理理论（ToM）进行了大量研究，但很少研究这两个方面，甚至很少研究从上下文中识别与执行功能相关的情绪的能力赤字。因此，本研究的目的是根据执行功能缺陷来检查AD患者的情感和认知ToM缺陷。方法：28名轻度AD患者和33名健康参与者完成了两个疗程，其中一个涉及神经心理学测试，我们对此特别感兴趣：能够根据情境将情绪归因于角色，并具有识别面部表情和理解社交笨拙的能力。执行职能，结果：与健康参与者相比，AD患者的羞耻，愤怒和中性表达识别能力受损。在没有面部表情可用的情况下，他们很难从视觉环境中推断出惊奇和厌恶，并且在Faux Pas测试的各个方面都受到损害。从整体上讲，与小组因素无关，三个ToM任务的表现与后向跨度测试的表现相关，而面部表情识别和Faux Pas测验中表现的显着差异由后向跨度的表现解释测试。然而，单独的分析未显示与AD患者有任何显着相关性。结论：我们的结果表明AD患者的情感和认知ToM受损。这种损害是选择性的，因为它仅涉及某些情绪。谨慎考虑这些结果，可能是患者的工作记忆困难至少部分解释了他们在ToM任务中的困难。