The role of dopamine in perception and expression of emotional communication in Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Abstract Dopamine is known to play an important role in affect control and reward related behaviour. Parkinson’s disease is characterised by degeneration of dopaminergic neurons mainly resulting in dopaminergic depletion in the nigrostriatal pathway but also in mesocorticolimbic projections. Besides motor signs, non- motor symptoms implicating changes of cognition and affect add to the clinical course of the disease. The ability to perceive and express emotions via speech plays an essential role in every day social life. In this chapter, studies investigating perception and production of emotional prosody in Parkinson’s disease will be reviewed and own results will be presented. Evidence will be provided that patients with Parkinson’s disease do have changes of emotional prosody processing and that they also show alterations of emotional speech production. Moreover, the role of dopamine depletion for the observed changes in emotional communication will be discussed.