Comparison of Emotion Recognition in Young People, Healthy Older Adults, and Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background: The basic discrete emotions, namely, happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise, and sadness, are present across different cultures and societies. Facial emotion recognition is crucial in social interactions, but normal and pathological aging seem to affect this ability. The present research aims to identify the differences in the capacity for recognition of the six basic discrete emotions between young and older healthy controls (HOC) and mildly cognitively impaired patients (MCI). Method: The sample ( N = 107) consisted of 47 young adults, 27 healthy older adults, and 33 MCI patients. Several neuropsychological scales were administered to assess the cognitive state of the participants, followed by the emotional labeling task on the Ekman 60 Faces test. Results: The MANOVA analysis was significant and revealed the presence of differences in the emotion recognition abilities of the groups. Compared to HOC, the MCI group obtained a significantly lower number of hits on fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise. The happiness emotion recognition rate did not differ significantly among the three groups. Surprisingly, young people and HOC did not show significant differences. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that MCI was associated with facial emotion recognition impairment, whereas normal aging did not seem to affect this ability.