The primary goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of how dementia affects the multimodal expression of emotions in face, gestures, verbal and non-verbal expressions when discussing emotional laden autobiographical memories. Therefore…
ID
Source
Brief title
Condition
- Other condition
Synonym
Health condition
dementie, emotie uitdrukkingen
Research involving
Sponsors and support
Intervention
Outcome measures
Primary outcome
The main study parameter is the multimodal expression of emotions. We are not
only interested in differences in the intensity of the expressed emotions, but
also in their composition in terms of the fusion of different modalities. By
comparing persons with dementia to healthy controls in a comparative study and
assessing changes in multimodal emotion expression in persons with dementia in
the longitudinal study, the effect of dementia on emotions can be studied.
Secondary outcome
With the data collected in this study, a corpus will be built for automatic
extraction of facial and speech expressions regarding automatic recognition of
emotions. The automatic recognition model of emotions can be established
through machine learning. The corpus will be made available to other
researchers who are interested in further work on automated emotion
recognition.
Background summary
Dementia is a group of neurodegenerative diseases that affect cognitive
processing. Nowadays, more than 270.000 persons have dementia in the
Netherlands, a figure that will double over the next 25 years. Besides problems
in cognitive functioning, 80-90% of the patients also suffer from problems in
emotional functioning. It is important to gain more insight in the emotional
functioning of persons with dementia as it is highly important to maintain
quality of life in person-centered care. Current research uses observational
instruments to assess emotional functioning in persons with dementia. However,
they do not provide the fine-grained insights that are necessary to understand
the factors influencing emotional responses and expressions of persons with
dementia. Emotional expression is a continuous process that involves many
features of behavioural, facial, vocal, and verbal modalities. Given this
complexity, few psychological studies have addressed emotion recognition in an
everyday context of persons with dementia.
Recent technological innovations in the field of affective computing aim to
take the complexities of emotional expression into account. Automatic emotion
detection makes it possible to study latent features that are difficult to
observe and track by human beings between different modalities. It also allows
us to investigate larger sets of video data in a smaller amount of time and for
unobtrusive analysis and monitoring of everyday emotions. However, little is
known about how these lab-based technologies generalize to real world problems.
Rather than a one-size-fits-all-solution, existing tools need to be adapted to
specific user groups in more natural settings. They also need to take large
individual differences into account.
Study objective
The primary goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of how
dementia affects the multimodal expression of emotions in face, gestures,
verbal and non-verbal expressions when discussing emotional laden
autobiographical memories. Therefore, we carry out an observational comparative
study between patients with dementia and matched healthy older adults, as well
as a longitudinal study on the development of emotion expression in patients
with early dementia across time to gain insight how dementia affects emotions
versus normal aging as well as the effect is when the disease progressed over
time.
The secondary goal of this project is to advance technologies that allow for
(automatic) recognition of emotions in persons with dementia. We therefore
explore machine learning techniques to advance technologies for multimodal
emotion recognition. Furthermore, we intend to create a corpus of the processed
video, audio and qualitative data for other researchers to use.
Study design
This is an observational study that consists of 1) a comparative study between
people with early dementia and healthy elderly; and 2) a longitudinal study
within people with early dementia. The comparative study consists of two
sessions. In the Session 1, participants have to fill in questionnaires, and
assess emotional laden memories with a word association task. In Session 2,
they discuss these memories in detail via a life story book based on the first
session and react to affective pictures. For the comparison study, the data of
healthy elderly was already collected in a previous study with ethical approval
of the committee at the University of Twente. The longitudinal study has 1
follow-up measurement point: after 8 months (Session 3).
Study burden and risks
The person with dementia will have in total 1 introduction meeting (60 minutes)
and 3 sessions of about 120 minutes each, so a total time investment of 7 hours
over a period of 8 months. Participants are free to collaborate in the study.
They may quit without reason and without consequences. There are no known
negative effects of reminiscence. Possible side effect might be the
recollection of negative memories. The principal investigator has experience
with dealing with negative memories and privacy issues. Furthermore, persons
with psychotrauma are excluded. Mentally competence of the participant with
Dementia will be monitored via themselves, caregiver or general
practitioner/specialist that is being informed of the participation in the
study of the participant with Dementia. If mentally competence becomes an issue
during the 8 months of the study, the participant, care giver or general
practitioner/specialist can indicate that it would be wise to cancel the
participation of the participant in the study. Last, participants are free to
decide whether and under which conditions their data may be included in the
corpus.
Drienerlolaan 5
Enschede 7522 NB
NL
Drienerlolaan 5
Enschede 7522 NB
NL
Listed location countries
Age
Inclusion criteria
1. early-mild dementia of the Alzheimer type (diagnosed by specialist in
dementia)
2. Being mentally competent to provide informed consent
3. Corrected vision and/or hearing
4. Good proficiency of the Dutch language (hearing and reading)
5. Participant has to be 65 years or older
Exclusion criteria
Past psychotrauma (module PTSS in Mini International Neuropsyciatric Interview)
more severe stage of dementia than early-mild dementia (based on the S-MMSE
score)
Design
Recruitment
Followed up by the following (possibly more current) registration
No registrations found.
Other (possibly less up-to-date) registrations in this register
No registrations found.
In other registers
| Register | ID |
|---|---|
| CCMO | NL68936.044.19 |
| Other | Trialregister: NL7659 |