Objective:The ability to recognize others’ emotions is a central aspect of socioemotional functioning. Emotion recognition impairments are well documented in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, but it is less understood whether they are also present in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Results on facial emotion recognition are mixed, and crucially, it remains unclear whether the potential impairments are specific to faces or extend across sensory modalities,Method:In the current study, 32 MCI patients and 33 cognitively intact controls completed a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and two forced-choice emotion recognition tasks, including visual and auditory stimuli. The emotion recognition tasks required participants to categorize emotions in facial expressions and in nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying) expressing neutrality, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasure, surprise, or sadness.Results:MCI patients performed worse than controls for both facial expressions and vocalizations. The effect was large, similar across tasks and individual emotions, and it was not explained by sensory losses or affective symptomatology. Emotion recognition impairments were more pronounced among patients with lower global cognitive performance, but they did not correlate with the ability to perform activities of daily living.Conclusions:These findings indicate that MCI is associated with emotion recognition difficulties and that such difficulties extend beyond vision, plausibly reflecting a failure at supramodal levels of emotional processing. This highlights the importance of considering emotion recognition abilities as part of standard neuropsychological testing in MCI, and as a target of interventions aimed at improving social cognition in these patients.

中文翻译：

---

轻度认知障碍患者对面部和声音情绪的识别受损

目的：识别他人情绪的能力是社会情绪功能的核心方面。情绪识别障碍在阿尔茨海默病和其他痴呆症中得到了充分证明，但人们对它们是否也存在于轻度认知障碍 (MCI) 中的了解较少。面部情绪识别的结果喜忧参半，至关重要的是，尚不清楚潜在的损伤是特定于面部还是延伸到整个感觉模式，方法：在目前的研究中，32 名 MCI 患者和 33 名认知完整的对照完成了全面的神经心理学评估和两个强迫选择情绪识别任务，包括视觉和听觉刺激。情绪识别任务要求参与者对面部表情和非语言发声（例如笑声、哭）表达中立、愤怒、厌恶、恐惧、快乐、快乐、惊讶或悲伤。结果：MCI 患者在面部表情和发声方面的表现都比对照组差。这种影响很大，在任务和个人情绪中相似，并且不能用感觉丧失或情感症状学来解释。情绪识别障碍在整体认知能力较低的患者中更为明显，但与进行日常生活活动的能力无关。似是而非地反映了情绪处理超模态水平的失败。