# Perception of emotionally incongruent cues: evidence for overreliance on body vs. face expressions in Parkinson's disease

## TL;DR

People with Parkinson's disease rely more on body language than facial expressions when judging emotions, even when they conflict.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel method using incongruent face-body cues to reveal emotion perception biases in Parkinson's disease.

## Key findings

- Individuals with Parkinson's disease prioritize body over facial expressions in emotion perception.
- Healthy controls showed the opposite tendency, prioritizing facial expressions.
- Schizophrenia patients did not show a consistent pattern of cue prioritization.

## Abstract

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) may exhibit impaired emotion perception. However, research demonstrating this decline has been based almost entirely on the recognition of isolated emotional cues. In real life, emotional cues such as expressive faces are typically encountered alongside expressive bodies. The current study investigated emotion perception in individuals with PD (n = 37) using emotionally incongruent composite displays of facial and body expressions, as well as isolated face and body expressions, and congruent composite displays as a baseline. In addition to a group of healthy controls (HC) (n = 50), we also included control individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) (n = 30), who display, as in PD, similar motor symptomology and decreased emotion perception abilities. The results show that individuals with PD showed an increased tendency to categorize incongruent face-body combinations in line with the body emotion, whereas those with HC showed a tendency to classify them in line with the facial emotion. No consistent pattern for prioritizing the face or body was found in individuals with SZ. These results were not explained by the emotional recognition of the isolated cues, cognitive status, depression, or motor symptoms of individuals with PD and SZ. As real-life expressions may include inconsistent cues in the body and face, these findings may have implications for the way individuals with PD and SZ interpret the emotions of others.