Social Cognition in Community Dwelling Persons With Dementia; Is Facial Emotion Recognition Related to Proxy Rated Empathy and Aggression?

Aggressive behaviour and decreased empathy occur in many dementia syndromes. This may be related to lowered overall cognitive functioning which is a common feature of dementia. However, to date, the role of social cognitive impairments such as facial emotion recognition (FER) deficits in dementias other than behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) remains largely elusive. This study focusses on people who were recently diagnosed with dementia in the memory clinic of a regional hospital, excluding bvFTD. The first question was whether FER was impaired in this group. Next the relation between FER, cognitive functioning and proxy‐rated levels of empathic and aggressive behaviour was examined.