Perception and Emotional Judgments of Music in Dementia of the Alzheimer Type: A Short Case Study

Abstract

dementia of the alzheimer type (ad) can affect emotional judgments of facial expression and prosody. Spared emotional judgments of music have been observed in early AD (Gagnon, Peretz, & Fülöp, 2009). The AD case study of Cuddy and Duffin (2005) showed relatively spared perception and memory for music. Through the single case study of MD, we again address the question of whether early AD might leave these abilities intact. The first experiment examined her musical emotional judgments in relation to mode and tempo. Overall results replicated the finding of a preserved response to changes in these structural properties. In a second experiment, we examined MD's recognition of musical and facial emotional expressions. She demonstrated a deficit only for the recognition of the facial expression of anger. Her performance adds to other empirical demonstrations that in early AD music perception and memory, as well as musical emotional judgments, may be relatively preserved.