Biomedical subjects

T J Plahovinsak

Publications and source records attributed to T J Plahovinsak.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1983

Facial- and postural-affect recognition in senile elderly persons.

Sixteen senile geriatric inpatients were tested for visual affect recognition under four conditions. In the first three conditions, they were presented with different sets of happy, sad and angry facial stimuli. In the fourth condition, postural sketches were used to express the three emotions. The subjects were tested by means of verbal prompting, i.e., they were directed to point to either the happy, sad or angry facial and bodily expressions over a series of trials. Significantly more errors were made to the angry expressions than to the happy and sad ones which, in turn, did not differ from one another. In addition, significantly more errors were generated by the facial stimuli than by the postural representations. These findings suggested a mechanism underlying prosopo-affective agnosia.

Affect↗

PubMed1981

On the mechanism underlying facial-affective agnosia in senile demented patients.

Two experiments were conducted in which senile demented patients were shown pictures of happy, sad, and angry faces, and tested for their ability to recognize these emotional expressions. Their affect recognition was obviously impaired, as they tended to respond to the line or feature characteristics of the faces, instead of the affective meaning that was suggested by the facial expressions. This impairment was somewhat overcome either by adding verbal cues which created an affective set, or by making feature detection irrelevant to the recognition process. It was shown that if the tendency to detect features is defeated, senile people can extract emotional meaning from facial stimuli. The data suggested that the mechanism underlying facial-affect agnosia is an impairment in the associative connections between the visual impression of facial expression and affective meaning.

Aged↗