Recognition Of Affective Prosody Research Articles

Dynamic facial emotion recognition and affective prosody recognition are associated in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

Deficits in facial emotion recognition have frequently been established in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). However, static, rather than dynamic emotion recognition paradigms have been applied. Affective prosody has been insufficiently studied in TLE, and there is a lack of studies investigating associations between auditory and visual emotion recognition. We wished to investigate potential deficits in a dynamic morph task of facial emotion recognition and in an affective prosody recognition task, as well as associations between both tasks. 25 patients with TLE and 24 healthy controls (CG) performed a morph task with faces continuously changing in their emotional intensity. They had to press a button, as soon as they were able to recognize the emotion expressed, and label it accordingly. In the auditory task, subjects listened to neutral sentences spoken in varying emotional tones, and labeled the emotions. Correlation analyses were conducted across both tasks. TLE patients showed significantly reduced prosody recognition compared to CG, and in the morph task, there was a statistical trend towards significantly reduced performance for TLE. Recognition rates in both tasks were significantly associated. TLE patients show deficits in affective prosody recognition, and they may also be impaired in a morph task with dynamically changing facial expressions. Impairments in basic social-cognitive tasks in TLE seem to be modality-independent.

Syntactic and affective prosody recognition: Schizophrenia vs. Autism spectrum disorders.

Patients with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia and individuals receiving a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder without accompanying intellectual impairment (ASD w/o intellectual impairment) during their adulthood share several clinical characteristics. Exploring under-investigated aspects of these two clinical conditions may shed light on their possible connection and facilitate differential diagnosis at very early stages. To this end, we explored the ability of 15 adults with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia, 15 individuals diagnosed with ASD w/o intellectual impairment as adults, and 15 healthy adults to resolve sentence ambiguities with the use of syntactic prosody, and to decode happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, and neutrality based on affective prosody. Results revealed intact perception of syntactic prosody in adults with schizophrenia, but impaired affective prosody recognition, which could be attributed, however, to emotion processing difficulties overall. On the other hand, individuals with ASD w/o intellectual impairment were impaired on prosody comprehension per se, as evidenced in the most challenging conditions, namely the subject-reading condition and the emotion of surprise. The differences in prosody comprehension ability between the two clinical conditions may serve as an indicator, among other signs, during the diagnostic evaluation.

Strong Relationship Between Rapid Auditory Processing and Affective Prosody Recognition Among Adults with High Autistic Traits.

This study investigated whether individuals with high autistic traits rely on psychoacoustic abilities in affective prosody recognition (APR). In 94 college students, Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and psychoacoustic abilities were measured. Results indicated that higher AQ, higher rapid auditory processing (RAP), and maleness were associated with a lower APR accuracy for low-intensity prosodies. There was a strong positive association between RAP and APR for participants with high AQ, whereas low-AQ participants showed no such pattern. The findings suggest a reliance on psychoacoustic abilities as compensatory mechanism for deficits in higher-order processing of emotional signals in social interactions, and imply potential benefits of auditory interventions in improving APR among individuals with high autistic traits.

Explicit Training to Improve Affective Prosody Recognition in Adults with Acute Right Hemisphere Stroke.

Difficulty recognizing affective prosody (receptive aprosodia) can occur following right hemisphere damage (RHD). Not all individuals spontaneously recover their ability to recognize affective prosody, warranting behavioral intervention. However, there is a dearth of evidence-based receptive aprosodia treatment research in this clinical population. The purpose of the current study was to investigate an explicit training protocol targeting affective prosody recognition in adults with RHD and receptive aprosodia. Eighteen adults with receptive aprosodia due to acute RHD completed affective prosody recognition before and after a short training session that targeted proposed underlying perceptual and conceptual processes. Behavioral impairment and lesion characteristics were investigated as possible influences on training effectiveness. Affective prosody recognition improved following training, and recognition accuracy was higher for pseudo- vs. real-word sentences. Perceptual deficits were associated with the most posterior infarcts, conceptual deficits were associated with frontal infarcts, and a combination of perceptual-conceptual deficits were related to temporoparietal and subcortical infarcts. Several right hemisphere ventral stream regions and pathways along with frontal and parietal hypoperfusion predicted training effectiveness. Explicit acoustic-prosodic-emotion training improves affective prosody recognition, but it may not be appropriate for everyone. Factors such as linguistic context and lesion location should be considered when planning prosody training.

Recognition of affective prosody in autism spectrum conditions: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Differences in understanding others' emotions and attitudes through features in speech (e.g. intonation) have been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions, which contribute greatly to their social communication challenges. However, some studies reported that individuals with autism spectrum condition performed comparably to typically developing individuals on affective prosody recognition. Here, we provide a comprehensive review with statistical analysis of 23 existing studies on this topic to examine potential factors that could explain the discrepancies. Compared with typically developing individuals, autism spectrum condition participants generally appeared to encounter more difficulties in affective prosody recognition. But this finding was likely due to the tendency of the existing research to overly focus on deficits in autism. The affective prosody recognition performance in individuals with autism spectrum condition was closely related to the number of answer options offered to them. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in affective prosody recognition encountered by individuals with autism spectrum condition varied across emotions. The findings of this systematic review highlighted the need for further research on affective prosody recognition in autism (e.g. studies that include tonal language speakers and autism spectrum condition individuals with lower cognitive or verbal abilities).

Interoceptive awareness mitigates deficits in emotional prosody recognition in Autism

The sensing of internal bodily signals, a process known as interoception, contributes to subjective emotional feeling states that can guide empathic understanding of the emotions of others. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) typically show an attenuated intuitive capacity to recognise and interpret other peoples’ emotional signals. Here we test directly if differences in interoceptive processing relate to the ability to perceive emotional signals from the intonation of speech (affective prosody) in ASC adults. We employed a novel prosody paradigm to compare emotional prosody recognition in ASC individuals and a group of neurotypical controls. Then, in a larger group of ASC individuals, we tested how recognition of affective prosody related to objective, subjective and metacognitive (awareness) psychological dimensions of interoception. ASC individuals showed reduced recognition of affective prosody compared to controls. Deficits in performance on the prosody task were mitigated by greater interoceptive awareness, so that ASC individuals were better able to judge the prosodic emotion if they had better insight into their own interoceptive abilities. This data links the ability to access interoceptive representations consciously to the recognition of emotional expression in others, suggesting a crossmodal target for interventions to enhance interpersonal skills.

Affective prosody and facial emotion recognition in first-episode schizophrenia: Associations with functioning & symptoms

Studies indicate that people with schizophrenia experience deficits in their ability to accurately detect emotions, both through facial expressions and voice intonation (i.e., prosody), and that functioning and symptoms are associated with these deficits. This study aimed to examine how facial emotion and affective prosody recognition are related to functioning and symptoms in a first-episode schizophrenia sample. Further, in light of research suggesting variable emotion-specific performance in people with schizophrenia, this study explored emotion-specific performance. Participants were 49 people with a recent first episode of schizophrenia taking part in a larger RCT. Results revealed that affective prosody recognition was significantly correlated with both role and social functioning. Regarding associations with psychiatric symptoms, facial emotion recognition was significantly, negatively associated with all three positive symptom scales, whereas affective prosody recognition was significantly, negatively associated with disorganization only. Emotion-specific analyses revealed that for affective prosody, participants were most accurate in recognizing anger and least accurate for disgust. For facial emotion recognition, participants were most accurate in recognizing happiness and least accurate for fear. Taken together, results suggest that affective prosody recognition is important for social and role functioning in people with first-episode schizophrenia. Results also suggest that this group may struggle more to identify negative emotions, though additional work is needed to clarify this pattern in affective prosody and determine real-world impact on social interactions.

Recognition of Facial Emotion and Affective Prosody in Children at High Risk of Criminal Behavior.

Emotion recognition is an important aspect of emotion processing, which is needed for appropriate social behavior and normal socialization. Previous studies in adults with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy, in those convicted of criminal behavior, or in children with conduct disorder show impairments in negative emotion recognition. The present study investigated affective facial and prosody recognition in a sample of children at high risk of developing future criminal behavior. Participants were 8- to 12-year-old children at high risk of developing criminal behavior (N=219, 83.1% boys) and typically developing controls (N=43, 72.1% boys). The high-risk children were recruited through an ongoing early intervention project of the city of Amsterdam, that focuses on the underage siblings or children of delinquents, and those failing to attend school. Facial and vocal recognition of happy, sad, angry, and fear was measured with the Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) test and the prosody test of the Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks (ANT), respectively. The high-risk group was significantly worse in facial affect recognition and had particular problems with fear and sadness recognition. No hostile attribution bias was found. The high-risk group did not differ from controls in affective prosody recognition but needed significantly more time to recognize emotions. The emotion-specific deficits found in forensic and clinical populations are already present in a sample of children at high risk of developing future criminal behavior. These findings help us understand a possible underlying mechanism of antisocial behavior that could provide directions for tailored interventions. (JINS, 2019, 25, 57-64).

Multimodal emotion processing deficits are present in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Emotion processing abilities might be reduced in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Previous studies of emotion processing in ALS have inconsistent results, and are limited by variations in task difficulty, modalities examined, and participants' cognitive status. The current study used a battery of emotion processing tasks at differing levels of difficulty and across different modalities (facial affect and voice prosody) to assess the extent of emotion processing deficits in nondemented ALS. 33 ALS participants with intact basic cognition and 22 healthy controls completed the abbreviated Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS), which assesses simple and complex facial affect recognition, affective prosody recognition, cross-modal face-prosody integration, and semantic comprehension of affect. Participants also completed measures of executive function, mood, and functional impairment. ALS participants showed impairments on complex facial affect recognition, affective prosody recognition, and cross-modal integration. In contrast, simple facial affect recognition and semantic comprehension of affect were intact. ALS participants did not have significant mood symptoms, and neither mood nor functional impairment was related to emotion processing. Performance on the cross-modal composite was related to executive function, however, this relationship was not apparent for facial or prosody recognition within a single modality. These results indicate that people living with ALS without dementia often have subtle difficulties with recognizing emotions in both faces and voices, even in the context of intact basic cognition. Clinicians should be aware of the potential for these emotion processing difficulties to be present in ALS and to affect interpersonal behavior and quality of life. (PsycINFO Database Record

Acute Ischemic Lesions Associated with Impairments in Expression and Recognition of Affective Prosody.

We aimed to: (a) review existing data on the neural basis of affective prosody;(b) test the hypothesis that there are double dissociations in impairments of expression and recognition of affective prosody; and (c) identify areas of infarct associated with impaired expression and/or recognition of affective prosody after acute right hemisphere (RH) ischemic stroke. Participants were tested on recognition of emotional prosody in content-neutral sentences. Expression was evaluated by measuring variability in fundamental frequency. Voxel-based symptom mapping was used to identify areas associated with severity of expressive deficits. We found that 9/23 patients had expressive prosody impairments; 5/9 of these patients also had impaired recognition of affective prosody; 2/9 had selective deficits in expressive prosody; recognition was not tested in 2/9. Another 6/23 patients had selective impairment in recognition of affective prosody. Severity of expressive deficits was associated with lesions in right temporal pole; patients with temporal pole lesions had deficits in expression and recognition. Expression and recognition of prosody can be selectively impaired. Damage to right anterior temporal pole is associated with impairment of both, indicating a role of this structure in a mechanism shared by expression and production of affective prosody.

Acute Ischemic Lesions Associated with Impairments in Expression and Recognition of Affective Prosody

Acute Ischemic Lesions Associated with Impairments in Expression and Recognition of Affective Prosody

Prosody recognition in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders: from psychoacoustics to cognition.

Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal emotion recognition. Compared with controls, the ASD group demonstrated poorer performance on both vocal and facial emotion recognition, but not on pragmatic prosody recognition or on any of the psychoacoustic tasks. Both groups showed strong associations between psychoacoustic abilities and prosody recognition, both affective and pragmatic, although these were more pronounced in the ASD group. Facial emotion recognition predicted vocal emotion recognition in the ASD group only. These findings suggest that auditory perceptual abilities, alongside general emotion recognition abilities, play a significant role in affective prosody recognition in ASD.

An examination of auditory processing and affective prosody in relatives of patients with auditory hallucinations

Research on auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) indicates that AVH schizophrenia patients show greater abnormalities on tasks requiring recognition of affective prosody (AP) than non-AVH patients. Detecting AP requires accurate perception of manipulations in pitch, amplitude and duration. Schizophrenia patients with AVHs also experience difficulty detecting these acoustic manipulations; with a number of theorists speculating that difficulties in pitch, amplitude and duration discrimination underlie AP abnormalities. This study examined whether both AP and these aspects of auditory processing are also impaired in first degree relatives of persons with AVHs. It also examined whether pitch, amplitude and duration discrimination were related to AP, and to hallucination proneness. Unaffected relatives of AVH schizophrenia patients (N = 19) and matched healthy controls (N = 33) were compared using tone discrimination tasks, an AP task, and clinical measures. Relatives were slower at identifying emotions on the AP task (p = 0.002), with secondary analysis showing this was especially so for happy (p = 0.014) and neutral (p = 0.001) sentences. There was a significant interaction effect for pitch between tone deviation level and group (p = 0.019), and relatives performed worse than controls on amplitude discrimination and duration discrimination. AP performance for happy and neutral sentences was significantly correlated with amplitude perception. Lastly, AVH proneness in the entire sample was significantly correlated with pitch discrimination (r = 0.44) and pitch perception was shown to predict AVH proneness in the sample (p = 0.005). These results suggest basic impairments in auditory processing are present in relatives of AVH patients; they potentially underlie processing speed in AP tasks, and predict AVH proneness. This indicates auditory processing deficits may be a core feature of AVHs in schizophrenia, and are worthy of further study as a potential endophenotype for AVHs.

Relationship between auditory processing and affective prosody in schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia have well-established deficits in their ability to identify emotion from facial expression and tone of voice. In the visual modality, there is strong evidence that basic processing deficits contribute to impaired facial affect recognition in schizophrenia. However, few studies have examined the auditory modality for mechanisms underlying affective prosody identification. In this study, we explored links between different stages of auditory processing, using event-related potentials (ERPs), and affective prosody detection in schizophrenia. Thirty-six schizophrenia patients and 18 healthy control subjects received tasks of affective prosody, facial emotion identification, and tone matching, as well as two auditory oddball paradigms, one passive for mismatch negativity (MMN) and one active for P300. Patients had significantly reduced MMN and P300 amplitudes, impaired auditory and visual emotion recognition, and poorer tone matching performance, relative to healthy controls. Correlations between ERP and behavioral measures within the patient group revealed significant associations between affective prosody recognition and both MMN and P300 amplitudes. These relationships were modality specific, as MMN and P300 did not correlate with facial emotion recognition. The two ERP waves accounted for 49% of the variance in affective prosody in a regression analysis. Our results support previous suggestions of a relationship between basic auditory processing abnormalities and affective prosody dysfunction in schizophrenia, and indicate that both relatively automatic pre-attentive processes (MMN) and later attention-dependent processes (P300) are involved with accurate auditory emotion identification. These findings provide support for bottom-up (e.g., perceptually based) cognitive remediation approaches.

Facial and vocal affect perception in people at ultra‐high risk of psychosis, first‐episode schizophrenia and healthy controls

The study aims to investigate affect recognition in young people at different stages of psychotic illness. Seventy-nine ultra-high risk patients, 30 first-episode schizophrenia patients and 30 healthy control subjects completed a facial affect labelling test and an affective prosody recognition test. Psychiatric symptoms were assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). We observed significant impairments in facial and vocal emotion recognition in both of the clinical groups compared with the control group. These group differences remained significant when age, sex and education were taken into account. The findings suggest that emotion recognition impairments may be independent of the stage of illness in schizophrenia. Deficits in emotion recognition may be present before the full expression of psychotic illness, and may contribute to the social cognition and social functioning deficits apparent in emerging psychotic disorders.

Recognition of affective prosody in brain-damaged patients and healthy controls: A neurophysiological study using EEG and whole-head MEG

A passive oddball experiment was used in which stimuli were emotional exclamations differing in their affective tone. In both electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), deviants elicited an N300 component, sometimes accompanied by a slow wave. Both components had a symmetrical distribution, but the former was more posterior than the latter. The same responses to prosodic stimuli were significant in 6 of 27 patients with severe disorders of consciousness (persistent vegetative state and minimally conscious state) and in all 3 of the examined locked-in patients, indicating that the procedure can be applied for testing neurological patients. The occurrence of significant responses depended on the presence or absence of a lesion to the right temporal lobe. Obviously, the N300 depends on the activity of the right temporal cortex but does not originate there. We suggest that the component is related not to the recognition of affective prosody as such, but to the following detection of affective mismatch due to violations of emotional context of stimulation.

Exploring recognition of affective prosody in patients with remitted depression: how do they differ from healthy participants?

Background Deficits in recognizing emotional states in others have been observed in several psychiatric and neurological disorders. Findings from studies examining emotion processing in depressed patients, however, have been inconsistent. Moreover, the indications of a generalized or a specific emotion recognition impairment have been controversial. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to explore emotion recognition, and, specifically, affective prosody recognition, in a sample of depressed patients in remission.

Impaired Perception of Affective Prosody in Schizophrenia

The authors aimed to explore schizophrenia patients' ability to perceive affective prosody. Specifically, certain emotions that may be more troublesome for patients and possible gender differences in prosody perception were assessed. Thirty six schizophrenia patients and 32 age-, education-, and gender-matched healthy comparison subjects assessed on an affective prosody test were examined. Patients were impaired on recognition of affective prosody overall, and their difficulties with prosody perception may be attributed to those emotions with negative valence, specifically anger and sadness. Findings revealed that only male patients were impaired on prosody perception. Deficits in the perception of affective prosody were principally evident in emotions with negative valence and male patients with schizophrenia. Future studies should explore the influence of these deficits on social and interpersonal functioning more directly.

Recognition of affective prosody by speakers of English as a first or foreign language

Adults who were fluent in English, and who grew up speaking English or one of 21 other languages listened to words spoken with angry or neutral intonation. We measured the accuracy with which the listeners identified the intended emotion. English mother tongue (EMT) polyglots scored higher than other mother tongue (OMT) listeners, whereas EMT monoglots did not. Women were significantly more accurate than men across the three listener groups. There was a modest inverse correlation between accuracy and age. The learning of a second language may have helped the EMT polyglots develop additional perceptual skills in decoding speech emotion in their native language.

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: Emergence of neurolinguistic deficits

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7–13 years), education, and IQ (83–122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.