The functional neuroanatomy of emotion processing in frontotemporal dementias.

Impaired processing of emotional signals is a core feature of frontotemporal dementia syndromes, but the underlying neural mechanisms have proved challenging to characterize and measure. Progress in this field may depend on detecting functional changes in the working brain, and disentangling components of emotion processing that include sensory decoding, emotion categorization and emotional contagion. We addressed this using functional MRI of naturalistic, dynamic facial emotion processing with concurrent indices of autonomic arousal, in a cohort of patients representing all major frontotemporal dementia syndromes relative to healthy age-matched individuals.

Cardiac responses to viewing facial emotion differentiate frontotemporal dementias.

Objective: To establish proof-of-principle for the use of heart rate responses as objective measures of degraded emotional reactivity across the frontotemporal dementia spectrum, and to demonstrate specific relationships between cardiac autonomic responses and anatomical patterns of neurodegeneration.

Methods: Thirty-two patients representing all major frontotemporal dementia syndromes and 19 healthy older controls performed an emotion recognition task, viewing dynamic, naturalistic videos of facial emotions while ECG was recorded. Cardiac reactivity was indexed as the increase in interbeat interval at the onset of facial emotions.

Auditory conflict and congruence in frontotemporal dementia.

Impaired analysis of signal conflict and congruence may contribute to diverse socio-emotional symptoms in frontotemporal dementias, however the underlying mechanisms have not been defined. Here we addressed this issue in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 19) and semantic dementia (SD; n = 10) relative to healthy older individuals (n = 20). We created auditory scenes in which semantic and emotional congruity of constituent sounds were independently probed; associated tasks controlled for auditory perceptual similarity, scene parsing and semantic competence.