Abstract
IntroductionBehavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is associated with abnormal emotion recognition and moral processing.MethodsWe assessed emotion detection, discrimination, matching, selection, and categorization as well as judgments of nonmoral, moral impersonal, moral personal low‐ and high‐conflict scenarios.ResultsbvFTD patients gave more utilitarian responses on low‐conflict personal moral dilemmas. There was a significant correlation between a facial emotion processing measure derived through principal component analysis and utilitarian responses on low‐conflict personal scenarios in the bvFTD group (controlling for MMSE‐score and syntactic abilities). Voxel‐based morphometric multiple regression analysis in the bvFTD group revealed a significant association between the proportion of utilitarian responses on personal low‐conflict dilemmas and gray matter volume in ventromedial prefrontal areas (p height < .0001). In addition, there was a correlation between utilitarian responses on low‐conflict personal scenarios in the bvFTD group and resting‐state fractional Amplitude of Low Frequency Fluctuations (fALFF) in the anterior insula (p height < .005).ConclusionsThe results underscore the importance of emotions in moral cognition and suggest a common basis for deficits in both abilities, possibly related to reduced experience of emotional sensations. At the neural level abnormal moral cognition in bvFTD is related to structural integrity of the medial prefrontal cortex and functional characteristics of the anterior insula. The present findings provide a common basis for emotion recognition and moral reasoning and link them with areas in the default mode and salience network.
Highlights
Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia is associated with abnormal emotion recognition and moral processing
The present findings provide a common basis for emotion recognition and moral reasoning and link them with areas in the default mode and salience network
The present results reveal that increased utilitaristic moral behavior is associated with decreased face emotion recognition in Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD)
Summary
Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is associated with abnormal emotion recognition and moral processing. There was a significant correlation between a facial emotion processing measure derived through principal component analysis and utilitarian responses on low-conflict personal scenarios in the bvFTD group (controlling for MMSE-score and syntactic abilities). Deficits in emotion recognition in bvFTD have been reported consistently and in multiple modalities like facial (Rosen et al, 2002), bodily (Van den Stock, De Winter, et al, 2015) and musical expressions (Omar et al, 2011). This has led to the hypothesis that there is a common basis for these multimodal socio-cognitive deficits. Should this be the case, it can be hypothesized that it has a similar influence on other higher order socio-cognitive deficits like moral reasoning abnormalities (Baez, Kanske, et al, 2016; Baez, Morales, et al, 2016; Chiong et al, 2013; Mendez, 2006, 2009; Mendez, Anderson, & Shapira, 2005; Mendez & Shapira, 2009)
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