Threat Perception in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Dementia

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia affect many aspects of emotion processing. Even though the ability to detect threat is a particularly important aspect of emotion processing, no study to date has assessed threat perception in either of these groups. The purpose of the present study was to test whether individuals with MCI (n = 38) and mild dementia (n = 34) have difficulty differentiating between faces and situations normatively judged to be either high or low in threat relative to age-matched controls (n = 34). To achieve this aim, all participants completed 2 danger rating tasks that involved viewing and rating high- and low-danger images. It was also assessed whether threat perception was related to cognitive functioning and emotion recognition. The results indicated that all 3 groups were accurately, and comparably, able to differentiate high from low-danger faces. However, the dementia group had difficulties differentiating high from low-danger situations, which reflected a bias to overattribute the level of threat posed by normatively judged nonthreatening situations. This difficulty was related to more general cognitive decline. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.