Abstract
Besides movement disorder, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are revealed to have non-motor deficits. To fast detect or discriminate emotion stimuli is the basic ability of a human, and this ability implies adaptive value. There were two purposes in this study. The first goal was to investigate the discrimination of facial expressions in PD. The second goal was to investigate whether the fast discrimination of facial expressions in PD related to the level of their motor severities. Twenty-eight PDs and 28 age-matched healthy controls were recruited in this study, and they were asked to discriminate between positive (happiness) and negative (sadness, fear, anger) faces. The results revealed that PD discriminated all faces longer than healthy controls did, and PD also had less accuracy in the condition of happy and sad faces compared with healthy controls. We had further analysis to separate PDs into two subgroups by the cut-off score “35” of UPDRS motor examination (part 3). PDs with lower motor severity performed worse in the condition of sad faces than healthy controls did. Beside the deficits in perceiving negative emotions, the PDs with higher motor severity had dysfunctions in processing happy faces. We concluded that PDs had selective deficits in discriminating facial expressions, and this discriminating ability would be getting worse along with the progress of motor severity.