Impairment of recognition of disgust in Chinese Wilson’s disease / 中华神经科杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective The selective deficit of recognition of disgust expression in Huntington’s disease (HD) and HD gene carrier strongly suggested the possibility that basal ganglia is involved in disgust processing. To further tested this hypothesis, we test the perception of emotional expressions in patients with symptomatic Wilson’s disease (WD), another basal ganglia disease resulted from abnormal copper metabo lism. Methods We developed a six basic emotional morphed face continuum (30 morphed emotional faces across happy surprise fear sad disgust anger happy). Participants were required to label each of these morphs in 5 trails to measure the ability of different emotion processing. The performances of 32 cases of WD were compared with 20 age and education matched normal controls. Results On the group level, although significantly impaired in fear, disgust and anger (correct identification scores 12.8?3.6;9.1?4.7;14.9?4.3, P