, 2012), multiple sclerosis (Henry et al., 2011), traumatic brain injury (Bornhofen & McDonald, 2008), Alzheimer’s disease (McCade, Savage, & Naismith, 2011), and Parkinson’s disease (Gray & Tickle-Degnen, 2010). While the Ekman 60 Faces Test has proven very useful in

clinical practice, it also has some limitations. First, a ceiling effect is present for the emotion happiness (mean performance of 9.9 from a maximum of 10 in healthy participants). Near-ceiling performances for recognition of this emotion are commonly found (see, e.g., Suzuki, Hoshino, & Shigemasu, 2006), as happy faces are easy to recognize in the absence of other positive emotions as possible distractors. However, although ceiling performances do not affect a test’s specificity, they do reduce a test’s sensitivity, which may be problematic in clinical practice. Second, only full-blown emotional

expressions are presented in the Ekman 60 Faces Test. It could selleck kinase inhibitor be argued that presenting facial expressions at lower intensities GSK1120212 solubility dmso would promote the detection of more subtle performance differences. Third, the stimuli are static photographs. It has been suggested that dynamic presentation of facial expressions (i.e., a neutral face gradually unfolding into an emotional expression) would, to a greater extent, resemble facial expression in everyday communication (Kamachi et al., 2001). Furthermore, movement is an important aspect of the perception of facial expressions that may even affect the accuracy of the perception (see Fiorentini & Viviani, 2011, for a discussion). To overcome these shortcomings, the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT) was developed, in which dynamically morphed facial expressions of the six basic emotions are presented at different levels of intensities (Montagne, Kessels, De Haan, & Perrett, 2007). This paradigm (sometimes

with slight variations in the administration selleck procedure) has been validated in various patient groups, such as Korsakoff’s amnesia (Montagne, Kessels, Wester, & De Haan, 2006), obsessive-compulsive disorder (Montagne et al., 2008), bipolar disorder (Gray et al., 2006), post-traumatic stress disorder (Poljac, Montagne, & De Haan, 2011), amygdalectomy (Ammerlaan, Hendriks, Colon, & Kessels, 2008), Huntington’s diseases (Montagne, Kessels, Kammers, et al., 2006), frontotemporal dementia (Kessels et al., 2007), schizophrenia (Scholten, Aleman, Montagne, & Kahn, 2005), autism spectrum disorder (Law Smith, Montagne, Perrett, Gill, & Gallagher, 2010), social phobia (Montagne, Schutters et al., 2006), depersonalisation disorder (Montagne, Sierra et al., 2007) and stroke (Montagne, Nys, Van Zandvoort, Kappelle, De Haan, & Kessels, 2007). To date, this test could not be used for neuropsychological assessment in clinical practice, but the ERT has recently been made available as part of the computerized DiagnoseIS neuropsychological assessment system (www.diagnoseis.com).