Prosodic Emotion Research Articles

Not all sounds sound the same: Parkinson's disease affects differently emotion processing in music and in speech prosody

Does emotion processing in music and speech prosody recruit common neurocognitive mechanisms? To examine this question, we implemented a cross-domain comparative design in Parkinson's disease (PD). Twenty-four patients and 25 controls performed emotion recognition tasks for music and spoken sentences. In music, patients had impaired recognition of happiness and peacefulness, and intact recognition of sadness and fear; this pattern was independent of general cognitive and perceptual abilities. In speech, patients had a small global impairment, which was significantly mediated by executive dysfunction. Hence, PD affected differently musical and prosodic emotions. This dissociation indicates that the mechanisms underlying the two domains are partly independent.

Further characterisation of the functional neuroanatomy associated with prosodic emotion decoding

IntroductionCurrent models of prosodic emotion comprehension propose a three stage cognition mediated by temporal lobe auditory regions through to inferior and orbitofrontal regions. Cumulative evidence suggests that its mediation may be more flexible though, with a facility to respond in a graded manner based on the need for executive control. The location of this fine-tuning system is unclear, as is its similarity to the cognitive control system. MethodsIn the current study, need for executive control was manipulated in a block-design functional MRI study by systematically altering the proportion of incongruent trials across time, i.e., trials for which participants identified prosodic emotions in the face of conflicting lexico-semantic emotion cues. Resultant Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent contrast data were analysed according to standard procedures using Statistical Parametric Mapping v8 (Ashburner et al., 2009). ResultsIn the parametric analyses, superior (medial) frontal gyrus activity increased linearly with increased need for executive control. In the separate analyses of each level of incongruity, results suggested that the baseline prosodic emotion comprehension system was sufficient to deal with low proportions of incongruent trials, whereas a more widespread frontal lobe network was required for higher proportions. ConclusionsThese results suggest an executive control system for prosodic emotion comprehension exists which has the capability to recruit superior (medial) frontal gyrus in a graded manner and other frontal regions once demand exceeds a certain threshold. The need to revise current models of prosodic emotion comprehension and add a fourth processing stage are discussed.

Single-trial EEG–fMRI coupling of the emotional auditory early posterior negativity

Event-related potential (ERP) studies in the visual domain often report an emotion-evoked early posterior negativity (EPN). Studies in the auditory domain have recently shown a similar component. Little source localization has been done on the visual EPN, and no source localization has been done on the auditory EPN. The aim of the current study was to identify the neural generators of the auditory EPN using EEG-fMRI single-trial coupling. Data were recorded from 19 subjects who completed three auditory choice reaction tasks: (1) a control task using neutral tones; (2) a prosodic emotion task involving the categorization of syllables; and (3) a semantic emotion task involving the categorization of words. The waveforms of the emotion tasks diverged from the neutral task over parietal scalp during a very early time window (132-156 ms) and later during a more traditional EPN time window (252-392 ms). In the EEG-fMRI analyses, the variance of the voltage in the earlier time window was correlated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, but only in the word task. In the EEG-fMRI analyses of the traditional EPN time window both emotional tasks covaried with activity in the left superior parietal lobule. Our results support previous parietal cortex source localization findings for the visual EPN, and suggest enhanced selective attention to emotional stimuli during the EPN time window.

Hemispheric asymmetries and prosodic emotion recognition deficits in Parkinson's disease

While Parkinson's disease (PD) has traditionally been described as a movement disorder, there is growing evidence of cognitive and social deficits associated with the disease. However, few studies have looked at multi-modal social cognitive deficits in patients with PD. We studied lateralization of both prosodic and facial emotion recognition (the ability to recognize emotional valence from either tone of voice or from facial expressions) in PD. The Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS) is a well-validated test of human emotion processing that has been used to study emotion recognition in several major clinical populations, but never before in PD. We administered an abbreviated version of CATS (CATS-A) to 24 medicated PD participants and 12 age-matched controls. PD participants were divided into two groups, based on side of symptom onset and unilateral motor symptom severity: left-affected (N=12) or right-affected PD participants (N=12). CATS-A is a computer-based button press task with eight subtests relevant to prosodic and facial emotion recognition. Left-affected PD participants with inferred predominant right-hemisphere pathology were expected to have difficulty with prosodic emotion recognition since there is evidence that the processing of prosodic information is right-hemisphere dominant. We found that facial emotion recognition was preserved in the PD group, however, left-affected PD participants had specific impairment in prosodic emotion recognition, especially for sadness. Selective deficits in prosodic emotion recognition suggests that (1) hemispheric effects in emotion recognition may contribute to the impairment of emotional communication in a subset of people with PD and (2) the coordination of neural networks needed to decipher temporally complex social cues may be specifically disrupted in PD.

Is Age-related Decline in Vocal Emotion Identification an Artefact of Labelling Cognitions?

Evidence has emerged that older adults find it more difficult to interpret prosodic emotions than younger adults. However, typical tasks involve labelling-related cognitions over and above emotion perception per se. Accordingly, we aimed to determine if age-related difficulty in prosodic emotion labelling extended to discrimination, which is more closely related to emotion perception per se. For this purpose, 45 younger adults (mean age 20 years, 2 males/43 females) and 45 older adults (mean age 71 years, 16 males/29 females) were recruited. In one task, participants heard pairs of sentences and were asked to indicate whether they were spoken with the same emotional intonational or not. In a second task, they heard sentences with intonation conveying a question or statement, and indicated whether the non-emotional intonation patterns matched or not. Older adults’ performance consistently fell below that of younger adults. Older adults may have a generic prosodic decoding deficit, regardless of the end function of the prosody.

The specificity of age-related decline in interpretation of emotion cues from prosody.

Older adults are not as good as younger adults at decoding prosodic emotions. We sought to determine the specificity of this finding. Performance of older and younger adults was compared on a prosodic emotion task, a "pure" prosodic emotion task, a linguistic prosody task, and a "pure" linguistic prosody task. Older adults were less accurate at interpreting prosodic emotion cues and nonemotional contours, concurrent semantic processing worsened interpretation, and performance was further degraded when identifying negative emotions and questions. Older adults display a pervasive problem interpreting prosodic cues, but further study is required to clarify the stage at which performance declines.

Valence specific laterality effects in free viewing conditions: The role of expectancy and gender of image

Recent research has looked at whether the expectancy of an emotion can account for subsequent valence specific laterality effects of prosodic emotion, though no research has examined this effect for facial emotion. In the study here ( n = 58), we investigated this issue using two tasks; an emotional face perception task and a novel word task that involved categorising positive and negative words. In the face perception task a valence specific laterality effect was found for surprise (positive) and anger (negative) faces in the control but not expectancy condition. Interestingly, lateralisation differed for face gender, revealing a left hemisphere advantage for male faces and a right hemisphere advantage for female faces. In the word task, an affective priming effect was found, with higher accuracy when valence of picture prime and word target were congruent. Target words were also responded to faster when presented to the LVF versus RVF in the expectancy but not control condition. These findings suggest that expecting an emotion influences laterality processing but that this differs in terms of the perceptual/experience dimension of the task. Further, that hemispheric processing of emotional expressions appear to differ in the gender of the image.

Decoding emotional prosody in Parkinson's disease and its potential neuropsychological basis

Parkinson's disease patients may have difficulty decoding prosodic emotion cues. These data suggest that the basal ganglia are involved, but may reflect dorsolateral prefrontal cortex dysfunction. An auditory emotional n-back task and cognitive n-back task were administered to 33 patients and 33 older adult controls, as were an auditory emotional Stroop task and cognitive Stroop task. No deficit was observed on the emotion decoding tasks; this did not alter with increased frontal lobe load. However, on the cognitive tasks, patients performed worse than older adult controls, suggesting that cognitive deficits may be more prominent. The impact of frontal lobe dysfunction on prosodic emotion cue decoding may only become apparent once frontal lobe pathology rises above a threshold.

FMRI evidence for the effect of verbal complexity on lateralisation of the neural response associated with decoding prosodic emotion

The pattern of intonation accompanying an utterance provides a powerful cue as to a speaker's emotional state of mind. Most prior lesion studies have demonstrated that the nodal point for decoding these prosodic emotion cues is mediated by unimodal auditory cortex in the right posterior lateral temporal lobe. However, functional neuroimaging has brought with it increasing attention to the equivalent left hemisphere region in this role. This study used fMRI to quantitatively assess the hypothesis that involvement of the left posterior lateral temporal lobe depended on the linguistic load or verbal complexity of the prosodic emotion stimuli. BOLD contrast data was acquired on a 3T scanner whilst 16 healthy young adults identified the prosodic emotion in three conditions: ‘sentences’ comprised of words, a repeated monosyllable, and a single prolonged syllable (asyllabic). Whole-brain analyses were performed using SPM5 and supplemented by posterior lateral temporal lobe region of interest (ROI) analyses. The whole-brain analyses appeared to show bilateral temporal lobe activation across the conditions, however, the ROI analyses indicated a highly significant decrease in activity in the left ROI as verbal complexity decreased. Changes in right ROI activity were not statistically significant. Our results indicate that the likelihood of observing a notable left temporal lobe response in functional neuroimaging studies of emotional prosody comprehension depends on the verbal complexity of the prosodic emotion stimuli. Despite the right hemisphere dominance underlying this task, the left hemisphere region may be co-activated in its attempt to extract phonetic-segmental information from the acoustic stimuli whether or not the stimuli contain meaningful phonetic-segmental information.

Emotion recognition in Chinese people with schizophrenia

This study examined whether people with paranoid or nonparanoid schizophrenia would show emotion-recognition deficits, both facial and prosodic. Furthermore, this study examined the neuropsychological predictors of emotion-recognition ability in people with schizophrenia. Participants comprised 86 people, of whom: 43 were people diagnosed with schizophrenia and 43 were controls. The 43 clinical participants were placed in either the paranoid group ( n = 19) or the nonparanoid group ( n = 24). Each participant was administered the Facial Emotion Recognition task and the Prosodic Recognition task, together with other neuropsychological measures of attention and visual perception. People suffering from nonparanoid schizophrenia were found to have deficits in both facial and prosodic emotion recognition, after correction for the differences in the intelligence and depression scores between the two groups. Furthermore, spatial perception was observed to be the best predictor of facial emotion identification in individuals with nonparanoid schizophrenia, whereas attentional processing control predicted both prosodic emotion identification and discrimination in nonparanoid schizophrenia patients. Our findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia in remission may still suffer from impairment of certain aspects of emotion recognition.

Does incongruence of lexicosemantic and prosodic information cause discernible cognitive conflict?

We are often required to interpret discordant emotional signals. Whereas equivalent cognitive paradigms cause noticeable conflict via their behavioral and psychophysiological effects, the same may not necessarily be true for discordant emotions. Skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rates (HRs) were measured during a classic Stroop task and one in which the emotions conveyed by lexicosemantic content and prosody were congruent or incongruent. The participants' task was to identify the emotion conveyed by lexicosemantic content or prosody. No relationship was observed between HR and congruence. SCR was higher during incongruent than during congruent conditions of the experimental task (as well as in the classic Stroop task), but no difference in SCR was observed in a comparison between congruence effects during lexicosemantic emotion identification and those during prosodic emotion identification. It is concluded that incongruence between lexicosemantic and prosodic emotion does cause notable cognitive conflict. Functional neuroanatomic implications are discussed.

Social-emotion recognition in borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by interpersonal disturbances, but the neurocognitive aspects of these symptoms are poorly understood. We hypothesized that patients with BPD have impaired perception of emotional expressions, which are related to symptoms of interpersonal dysfunction. To control potential confounding factors, this study excluded subjects with comorbid diagnoses known to be associated with impaired affect perception. We tested 43 outpatients with BPD and 26 healthy controls on emotion recognition tasks (facial, prosodic, and integrated facial/prosodic), nonemotional facial feature recognition, and interpersonal antagonism (Buss-Durkee Hostility Index). Patients with BPD showed normal ability to recognize isolated facial or prosodic emotions but had impaired recognition of emotions in integrated facial/prosodic stimuli, as well as impaired discrimination of nonemotional facial features. In patients with BPD, impaired recognition of integrated emotional stimuli was associated with interpersonal antagonism, particularly suspiciousness and assaultiveness. These results suggest that patients with BPD have deficits in higher order integration of social information, which may be related to some of the more serious symptoms of the disorder.

Selective impairment of sadness and disgust recognition in abstinent ecstasy users

Previous data have suggested that ecstasy use may affect cognitive functions. The relationship between ecstasy use and emotion recognition remains largely unknown. This study reports the findings on the neuropsychological effects of ecstasy use on recognition of basic human emotions among 100 abstinent ecstasy users, along with 100 demographically matched nonusers. Recognition of both facial and prosodic emotions was studied. In addition, neuropsychological predictors of emotion recognition for abstinent ecstasy users were examined. The results showed that abstinent ecstasy users were impaired, relative to nonusers, on overall emotion recognition. In particular, recognition of sadness and disgust was significantly affected. The emotion-recognition deficits observed among the abstinent ecstasy users may reflect a complex derangement of monoamines and/or general degenerative change observed in the addicted populations. The length of time in months since ecstasy was last consumed, cumulative ecstasy dosage, and years of education negatively predicted various domains of emotion recognition. The observation that nonverbal and verbal fluency functions were significant predictors of emotion identification, as well as of recognition of sadness and disgust, suggests that the frontal executive system might be affected by ecstasy use.

Cerebral mechanisms for understanding emotional prosody in speech

Hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were investigated by comparing adults with a focal lesion involving the right ( n = 9) or left ( n = 11) hemisphere and adults without brain damage ( n = 12). Participants listened to semantically anomalous utterances in three conditions ( discrimination, identification, and rating) which assessed their recognition of five prosodic emotions under the influence of different task- and response-selection demands. Findings revealed that right- and left-hemispheric lesions were associated with impaired comprehension of prosody, although possibly for distinct reasons: right-hemisphere compromise produced a more pervasive insensitivity to emotive features of prosodic stimuli, whereas left-hemisphere damage yielded greater difficulties interpreting prosodic representations as a code embedded with language content.

The role of sub-cortical brain structures in emotion recognition

Primary objective: This study investigated the role of sub-cortical brain structures in emotion recognition.Methods and procedures: Fourteen patients (eight left, six right) with sub-cortical brain damage (SS) and 14 matched healthy volunteers (HV) were recruited. A brief neuropsychological battery was administered to measure working memory, visual inattention, Stroop effect and visual organization. A facial and prosodic emotion recognition battery previously developed was used.Results: SS patients were generally impaired on emotion recognition, with the exception of facial emotion discrimination and tasks involving happy expressions, relative to HV. Preliminary analyses also showed no statistical difference between patients with left- and right-sub-cortical brain damage in terms of emotion recognition.Conclusions: The findings provide further support for the role of sub-cortical brain structures (and the damage thereof) as well as probable frontal-limbic neural networks in recognizing basic emotions.

Recognition of emotion from moving facial and prosodic stimuli in depressed patients

Background: It has been suggested that depressed patients have a “negative bias” in recognising other people’s emotions; however, the detailed structure of this negative bias is not fully understood. Objectives:...

Acoustical analysis of posed prosodic expressions: effects of emotion and sex.

Prosodic expression is an important channel of emotional communication and can be assessed through computerized acoustical analysis. Fundamental frequency (F0) is the most commonly studied acoustic measure and considered the best index of perceived pitch. In this study, we examined two factors that can influence prosodic expression, sex and emotion type. A special feature is the use of a neutral expression as a control measure. We also described procedures for eliciting posed prosodic expression via an experimental task from the New York Emotion Battery. Subjects were healthy men (n=10) and women (n=9), matched for age (M=29.2 yr.) and education (M=15.6 yr.). Subjects were asked to intone neutral-content sentences with happy, sad, and neutral prosody. F0 mean and standard deviation were measured using the Computerized Speech Lab program. Initial findings indicated that women produced significantly higher F0 values than did men and that happy sentences were produced with significantly higher F0 values than were sad sentences. When semitone conversions were applied and neutral prosody was subtracted out, differences remained for emotion type but not for sex. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for the assessment and treatment of prosody in clinical populations.

Cerebral hemodynamics during discrimination of prosodic and semantic emotion in speech studied by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography.

Cerebral hemodynamics during discrimination of prosodic and semantic emotion in speech studied by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography.

Perception and production of facial and prosodic emotions by chronic CVA patients

Variable etiology, limited testing of emotions and inclusion of patients in acute and chronic phases have made it difficult to specify the extent of right hemisphere involvement in the processing of emotional material. In addition, there is an absence of data concerning CVA patients’ long-term abilities to process emotional information. Two groups of subjects with unilateral brain damage (15 RBD, 17 LBD), matched for chronicity (minimum 12 months post-CVA), etiology (ischemic CVA), duration of hospitalization and other variables, and an appropriate control group participated in two experiments to address these concerns. In the first experiment, subjects were given a series of tasks (discrimination, identification, imitation, production on request) to assess their processing of facial expressions of the six universal emotions [P. Ekman, W. Friesen, Unmasking the face, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1975]. The results showed that three emotions (surprise, happiness, fear) discriminate between RBD and LBD patients and controls, with RBD subjects performing worse than the other groups on the identification task only. Using tasks of the same nature, the second experiment investigated the processing of emotional prosody. The results showed that three emotions (fear, sadness, anger) discriminate between RBD and LBD patients and controls, with RBD subjects again performing worse than the others on the discrimination, imitation and production on request tasks. LBD subjects performed as well as normal controls on almost all tasks. The RBD subjects were the only ones who showed relatively consistent impairment in the processing of both facial and prosodic emotional information. Taken together, these data strongly suggest that the right hemisphere is preferentially involved in processing emotional information in the chronic phase of brain damage.

Emotional Perception in Unilateral Stroke Patients: Recovery, Test Stability, and Interchannel Relationships

Despite an ever-increasing literature on language and cognitive recovery after brain injury, there are relatively few investigations about the recovery of emotional processing. The main purpose of this study was to provide a preliminary evaluation of recovery of emotional perception across 3 communication channels in unilateral stroke patients. In addition, instrument stability and interrelationships among the channels were examined. Tasks assessing facial, prosodic, and lexical emotional identification from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) were administered to right-brain-damaged (RBD), left-braindamaged (LBD), and normal control (NC) participants. Emotional, as well as nonemotional control, tasks were examined at 2 times, with a median interval of 25 months. Findings revealed some evidence of recovery on emotional perception tasks. Participant group differences were found at baseline on lexical and prosodic emotion tasks. Test-retest correlations were high for NCs and LBDs but low for RBDs. Significant relationships were more frequent for the facial versus prosodic channel than for the lexical versus the 2 nonverbal channels, suggesting that facial and prosodic perception may subserve a general emotional processor.