Emotion recognition in people with Parkinson's (SPiEs) v1.0

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Sensitivity of people with Parkinson's to different intensities of emotions (SPiEs)

• IRAS ID

  163245

• Contact name

  Louise S Delicato

• Contact email

  Louise.Delicato@ncl.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 6 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  We want to characterise the ability of people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) to recognise the emotions of others through their facial expressions. Although PD is often thought of as a movement disorder, there are non-motor symptoms that patients find equally problematic. These non-motor symptoms include problems recognising and expressing emotion.

  Understanding the nature of the difficulty that PD patients have in recognising the emotions of others might help us understand the progression of the disease. The difficulty that individual patients have with recognising the emotions of others might be related to their problems with cognitive function (for example, memory and attention).

  We will recruit people with PD (and age-matched controls) aged 50 and over. Patients will be included in one of two clinical sub-groups:
  1) PD without cognitive impairment
  2) PD with cognitive impairment

  We will measure the ability of PD patients to recognise emotions by presenting images of facial expressions on a screen. Participants respond by indicating which of the images had the most expression, or by categorising whether the face presented was happy (or angry, disgust, fear, sad, surprise and neutral). Parkinson's disease could be indicated by how sensitive the individual is to the emotions presented. It could be indicated by whether individuals are more sensitive to one emotion compared with others.

  The results from this study could be used as a framework for the development of a tool to improve diagnosis and treatment outcomes in PD. An individual’s sensitivity to different emotions might be able to predict the clinical sub-group that the patient belongs to.

• REC name

  West Midlands - Edgbaston Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  15/WM/0245

• Date of REC Opinion

  4 Aug 2015

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion