This investigation examined whether impairment in configural processing could explain deficits in face emotion recognition in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Stimuli from the Radboud Faces Database were used to compare recognition of four negative emotion expressions by older adults with PD (n = 16) and matched controls (n = 17). Participants were tasked with categorizing emotional expressions from upright and inverted whole faces and facial composites; it is difficult to derive configural information from these two types of stimuli so featural processing should play a larger than usual role in accurate recognition of emotional expressions. We found that the PD group were impaired relative to controls in recognizing anger, disgust and fearful expressions in upright faces. Then, consistent with a configural processing deficit, participants with PD showed no composite effect when attempting to identify facial expressions of anger, disgust and fear. A face inversion effect, however, was observed in the performance of all participants in both the whole faces and facial composites tasks. These findings can be explained in terms of a configural processing deficit if it is assumed that the disruption caused by facial composites was specific to configural processing, whereas inversion reduced performance by making it difficult to derive both featural and configural information from faces.

中文翻译：

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理解配置处理在帕金森病面部情绪识别中的作用

这项调查检查了配置处理的障碍是否可以解释帕金森病 (PD) 患者面部情绪识别的缺陷。来自 Radboud Faces Database 的刺激被用来比较 PD 老年人 ( n  = 16) 和匹配对照 ( n = 17）。参与者的任务是对直立和倒立的全脸以及面部合成的情绪表达进行分类；很难从这两种类型的刺激中获取配置信息，因此特征处理在准确识别情绪表达方面应该发挥比平常更大的作用。我们发现，相对于对照组，PD 组在识别直立脸上的愤怒、厌恶和恐惧表情方面受到了损害。然后，与配置处理缺陷一致，患有 PD 的参与者在尝试识别愤怒、厌恶和恐惧的面部表情时没有表现出复合效应。然而，在所有参与者在全脸和面部合成任务中的表现中都观察到了面部反转效应。