Emotion regulation difficulties are selectively associated with executive and behavioural apathy in Huntington's disease

Objective

Apathy occurs frequently in psychiatric and neurological disorders and is associated with functional impairment, reduced quality of life, and caregiver burden. Its underlying mechanisms are incompletely understood, but recent studies indicate that apathy is multidimensional and has heterogeneous manifestations across disorders. Self-regulatory processes, such as emotion regulation, may contribute to these manifestations, but this relationship has received little attention. Huntington's disease (HD) provides a clinical model for examining whether emotion regulation difficulties are associated with global and multidimensional apathy.