NOVEL VIRTUAL REALITY‐ BASED METHOD FOR OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT OF EMOTIONAL REACTIVITY IN PATIENTS WITH ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Diminished emotional reactivity in cognitively normal (CN) older adults and in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with higher burden of neuropathology and predicts faster cognitive decline, stressing its potential to serve as a behavioral screening tool for individuals at high AD‐risk and for a more aggressive disease course. Its measurement is currently based on questionnaires which are prone to subjectivity biases. We present preliminary results of a study aimed to examine the feasibility of using autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity to emotional stimuli presented in a virtual reality (VR) environment, as an objective measurement tool of emotional reactivity. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that emotional reactivity, as expressed by galvanic skin response (GSR), will be reduced in patients with AD compared to CN individuals.