Laughter as a paradigm of socio-emotional signal processing in dementia.

ABSTRACT: Laughter is a fundamental communicative signal in our relations with other people and is used to convey a diverse repertoire of social and emotional information. It is therefore potentially a useful probe of impaired socio-emotional signal processing in neurodegenerative diseases. Here we investigated the cognitive and affective processing of laughter in forty-seven patients representing all major syndromes of frontotemporal dementia, a disease spectrum characterised by severe socio-emotional dysfunction (twenty-two with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, twelve with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, thirteen with nonfluent-agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia), in relation to fifteen patients with typical amnestic Alzheimer's disease and twenty healthy age-

SUBMITTER: Sivasathiaseelan H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8438290 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature