How is the processing of emotion impaired in FTD? How does it affect the ability to remember meaningful and important information from one’s life? How does it affect interpersonal relationships? How do these deficits evolve with time?
These are some of the questions we are trying to answer in this research project funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. This project will follow patients with FTD who will undergo tests of memory, language and thinking abilities and will receive a brain MRI scan at yearly intervals. We will also interview family members of patients to understand the impact of the disease on interpersonal relationships.
As part of this project we have been developing new tasks which look at people’s abilities to recognise and identify emotions expressed in faces and in music. Parallel work is investigating the brain regions involved in the recognition of tunes and melodies plus those important for processing the emotional components of music.
