Affective processing in left and right hemisphere brain-damaged subjects with and without subcortical involvement

Processing emotional tone from speech in Parkinson’s disease: A role for the basal ganglia

“…Cancelliere and Kertesz (1990) assessed emotion comprehension and expression in 46 patients with focal stroke lesions and then applied a CT-overlap technique to associate prosody deficits with lesion site; the authors' overall conclusion was that damage to the basal ganglia correspondedmost strongly with detectable impairments in prosody comprehension. Starkstein et al (1994) also have reported a relationship between (right) basal ganglia lesions and more severe emotional prosody deficits in their survey of 59 consecutive stroke patients, as have other researchers (Bradvik et al, 1991;Karow et al, 2001;Weddell, 1994;cf. Adolphs et al, 2002).…”

“…There are accumulating indications that the basal ganglia assume a role in how humans process speech prosody, especially its emotive content (Breitenstein et al, 1998;Cancelliere & Kertesz, 1990;Karow, Marquardt, & Marshall, 2001;Kotz et al, 2003;Morris et al, 1999;Pell, 1996;Starkstein et al, 1994). One approach for inferring how the basal ganglia contribute to these (and other) facets of behavior and cognition is to study nondemented adults in the relatively early stages of idiopathic PD, when damage is largely confined to these structures (e.g., SaintCyr, Taylor, & Lang, 1988).…”

Processing of ambiguous emotional messages in brain injured patients with and without subcortical lesions

“…Listeners must simultaneously process affective prosody, facial expressions, body gestures, and semantic information in order to determine the speaker's emotional intent. Recent research in patient populations underscores the role of subcortical structures in unimodal emotion recognition (Cancelliere & Kertesz, 1990;Cheung, Lee, Yip, King, & Li, 2006;Karow, Marquardt, & Marshall, 2001;Paulmann, Pell, & Kotz, 2008;Starkstein, Federoff, Price, Leiguarda, & Robinson, 1994;Yip, Leuing, Li, & Lee, 2004). The role of subcortical structures in processing bimodal affective cues, however, is limited.…”

“…Similarly, Starkstein et al (1994) found that stroke patients who exhibited comprehension deficits for emotional prosody were more likely to present with deficits in facial emotion comprehension and to have right-hemisphere lesions involving the basal ganglia. Karow et al (2001) expanded on these earlier studies with the a priori identification of four participant groups (left and right cortical damage and left and right subcortical damage). Additionally, the study incorporated ecologically valid video stimuli and assessed identification of affectively charged linguistic stimuli.…”

“…Additionally, differential preferences for specific paralinguistic cues (acoustic, visual) were not investigated. In studies investigating accuracy of responses to unimodal affective cues, however, facial expression appears to be more salient than emotional prosody (Karow et al, 2001;McDonald & Saunders, 2005). Karow et al found that when depth of lesion was controlled, participants with lesions confined to the cortex were no different than the non-braindamaged controls when identifying emotions on unimodal affective processing tasks.…”