EAN 2026 | How emotions influence gait and brain activity in Parkinson’s disease
Andrea Gardoni, PhD(c), Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy, discusses findings on how emotions influence gait and brain activity in Parkinson’s disease. He explains how positive emotions improved gait performance and increased activity in motor-related brain regions, while negative emotions impaired gait. Dr Gardoni also highlights the potential of incorporating emotional content into rehabilitation strategies. This interview took place at the 12th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Transcript
Emotions are a crucial part of our everyday life, and I think it’s easy to imagine how emotions impact and influence our movement and our walking ability in everyday life. We wanted to in this study to understand if emotions can impact gait and brain activity in patients with Parkinson’s disease. So we asked patients to walk spontaneously and in bottom-up and top-down embodiment conditions, so with self-evoked emotions or while imitating videos of people walking while experiencing different emotions...
Emotions are a crucial part of our everyday life, and I think it’s easy to imagine how emotions impact and influence our movement and our walking ability in everyday life. We wanted to in this study to understand if emotions can impact gait and brain activity in patients with Parkinson’s disease. So we asked patients to walk spontaneously and in bottom-up and top-down embodiment conditions, so with self-evoked emotions or while imitating videos of people walking while experiencing different emotions. And during the primary task, we also asked the patients to observe emotional gait videos. We found that positive emotions, such as happiness, produced an increased gait speed, increased stride length, and arm swing amplitude, together with increased activity in the basal ganglia and sensorimotor areas, while negative emotions, such as sadness or anxiety, reduced brain activity and produced a worse gait pattern. These results suggest and underline the importance of emotions in the context of assessment and treatment of patients with Parkinson’s disease, and promote the idea of including emotional content for action observation strategy in the rehabilitation field.
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